HANDBOUND
AT THE

UNIVERSITY OF
TORONTO PRESS

PADS, PAWS, AND CLAWS

By W. P. PYCRAFT, F.Z.S., A.L.S. (Natural
History Museum), Author of " The Animal Why
Book," etc. Pictures by EDWIN NOBLE, R.B.A.
11 x 8|, paper boards, cloth back, 5s. net.
M An animal book of the firtt order."— T. P.'s WetUy.

THE ANIMAL WHY BOOK

By W. P. PYCRAFT, F.Z.S., A.L.S. Illustrated
in Colours by EDWIN NOBJLE, R.B.A. llxSJ,
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- Bookman.

HELPERS WITHOUT HANDS

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HELMET AND COWL

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THE MIGHTY ARMY

By W. M. LETTS, Author of "The Rough Way,"
etc. Illustrated in Colour by STEPHEN REID.
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A GALLERY OF HEROES AND

HEROINES

* A GALLERY
OF HEROES AND
HEROINES

BY

SIR HARRY JOHNSTON

AUTHOR OF "PIONEERS OF EMPIRE"

WITH COLOURED PORTRAITS

BY

JOSEPH SIMPSON, R.I.

LONDON

WELLS GARDNER, DARTON & CO., LTD.
3 & 4 PATERNOSTER BUILDINGS

bn

1913

Francis Drake

Walter Raleigh -

James Wolfe of Quebec ....

Captain James Cook

Nelson of the Nile . - -

Arthur Wellesley, First Duke of Wellington

Elizabeth Fry

Page
1

13

26
38
50
61
77

Contents

Havelock of Lakhnau

David Livingstone of Central Africa
Florence Nightingale - ...
General Gordon ....
Robert Falcon Scott of the Antarctic

P.*.
83

91
105
111
126

VI

A GALLERY OF HEROES AND

HEROINES

FRANCIS DRAKE

FRANCIS DRAKE, like so many
other great pioneers or defenders
of the British Empire, was born in
Devonshire; but in training and
mental outlook he was much more
of a Kentish man. His father (a
yeoman farmer) had been so zeal-
ous for religious reform in the
reigns of Henry VIII. and Edward VI. that when
the Marian persecutions of Protestants began he
was obliged to leave Devonshire and live as ob-
scurely as possible in those parts of Kent where the
spread of Protestantism made local inquiry into
religious beliefs a dangerous enterprise for officials.
When Queen Elizabeth came to the throne, the
father of Francis Drake resumed his preachings and
apparently was ordained for service in the Church
of England, after serving for a time as a chaplain on
board the Queen's ships. His son Francis, who was
born in the early forties of the sixteenth century

A Gallery of Heroes and Heroines

(the date is very uncertain, ranging between 1539
and 1545), was early taken in hand by his cousin,
Captain (afterwards Sir John) Hawkins, who de-
signed him for a sea career. Early in his teens
Francis Drake served as an apprentice on sailing-
ships coasting about the Channel, and by the time
he was about eighteen years old was sufficiently
educated and used to a sea life to be made purser or
supercargo in a ship which traded between England
and Spain. When he was only twenty he made a
voyage as far as the west coast of Africa, possibly in
a ship commanded by his cousin John Hawkins.
From the Guinea Coast (somewhere between the
Gambia and Sierra Leone) he went as mate in a
small vessel which carried slaves for sale in the
West Indies. In 1567 he was promoted to be the
master of a ship called the Judith, which was one
of a fleet collected by John Hawkins for the purpose
of attacking the Spaniards on the coast of Mexico.

By the end of the fifteenth century, English,
Italians, Spanish, and Portuguese, had discovered
nearly all the West India Islands and the most
striking features of the eastern coast of America
between Newfoundland and the north of Brazil.
Between 1502 and 1560 the Spaniards had conquered
and occupied Florida, Texas, Mexico, Central
America, Colombia, Venezuela, and Peru, whilst the
Portuguese had colonised one or two points on the
coast of Brazil. Both countries claimed that the
whole of the New World between the Arctic and
Antarctic zones was theirs by virtue of a grant from

2

Francis Drake

the Pope, which grant further conferred on the
kingdom of Portugal all West and East Africa and
the coasts of India and Malaysia. These two
kingdoms of the Iberian peninsula determined to
keep the commerce of Africa, America, and Asia for
themselves, or rather, for such persons, companies,
or associations as were granted trading privileges by
the Kings of Spain or Portugal. When, in 1580, the
King of Spain became also the King of Portugal the
monopoly was indeed unbearable for the rest of the
awakened world of Europe. But even before this
tremendous concentration of power in the hands of
Philip II. had come about, both French and English
had refused to recognise the exclusive right of the
Spanish and Portuguese monarchs to hold Africa,
America, and Asia in fee. Bold sea rovers— pirates,
they often were — had started from the coasts of
England and France to explore the worlds beyond
the north-east Atlantic. Frenchmen were endeav-
ouring to establish Huguenot colonies in Brazil and
Florida, and to resume an old trade with the west
coast of Africa. The English, after discovering
Newfoundland under Henry VII. and making other
visits to the New World in the early part of
Henry VIII.'s reign, were quiet for a while, but
broke out again under Edward VI. and Mary in
attempts to trade to the west coast of Africa despite
Portuguese remonstrances. Not long after Eliza-
beth had come to the throne they were as well
acquainted with the coasts of Guinea as the Portu-
guese themselves, and on the whole were better

3

A Gallery of Heroes and Heroines

received there because of their better treatment of
the natives. This friendliness encouraged sea-
captains like John Hawkins to embark on a trade
in slaves, which they hoped might lead to friendlier
relations with the Spaniards in America.

The Spaniards had soon found the supply of
Amerindian natives in Tropical America quite in-
sufficient for industrial purposes. They were of
weakly constitution, and soon died in the cruel
slavery imposed on them. Very early, therefore, in
the sixteenth century the Spaniards had begun to
import negroes from Portugal, Southern Spain, and
North Africa, as sturdy miners and agricultural
labourers. But the Spanish sea-captains for some
reason disliked visiting the west coast of Africa,
and preferred to entrust to Flemings or Portuguese
the trade of bringing negro slaves from that direction
to America. Much as they already suspected the
English of future rivalry, and much as they disliked
them for their religious views, they several times
winked at the bold infringement of their monopoly
on the part of Hawkins and other Englishmen
who brought slaves from West Africa to the Canary
Islands, and even to the Gulf of Mexico. However,
they soon turned and rent them when it was seen
that the English were inclined not to limit their
efforts to the purveying of slaves, but to trade them-
selves with the Spanish settlers or the unconquered
Indians in Tropical America. A quarrel arose
between the Spanish authorities and Hawkins,
whose fleet of vessels was treacherously attacked off

4

Francis Drake

the coast of Mexico in the early part of 1568. Francis
Drake, in the panic of the attack, put out to sea and
abandoned his cousin in this extremity. However,
Hawkins likewise managed to get his ship away
from the Spanish fleet and joined Drake on his
home journey across the Atlantic. Both Drake and
Hawkins were now deadly enemies of the Spaniards.
Drake, indeed, asserted that in his journeys of
1565 to 1568, he had suffered great losses through
treacherous attacks that were made on him by
Spaniards or Portuguese. In 1572 he obtained a
privateering commission from Queen Elizabeth (a
kind of vague permission to obtain redress), and
then sailed direct from England to a Spanish settle-
ment called Nombre de Dios (" Name of God "),
which had actually been founded by Columbus
himself in the bay of Porto Belo, on the north coast
of the Isthmus of Panama. Drake had two small
ships, the Pasha and the Swan. His appearance off
Porto Belo, utterly unexpected, took the Spaniards
so completely by surprise that they made but little
resistance. He landed his men, plundered Nombre
de Dios, laid up his ships in the mangrove creek,
and boldly started across the Isthmus of Panama in
order to see for himself whether there was (as the
Spaniards reported) another great sea at no far
distance. From the branches of a tree on the
summit of a low hill he caught his first glimpse of
the Pacific Ocean, and the tremendous importance
of this discovery at once filled his mind. He then
and there resolved that he would before long be

5

A Gallery of Heroes and Heroines

navigating what he styled "the South Atlantic
Ocean."

As the Isthmus of Panama follows an almost
east to west direction, it seemed to the explorers of
those days, arriving from the north, that this other
great ocean must be the Southern Ocean, the ocean
which Magellan had entered on his memorable
voyage round the world by passing through straits
at the extremity of South America. On this occa-
sion (in 1672) Drake and his seamen enlisted in their
service a number of runaway negro slaves whom
they found in the forests of the Panama isthmus.
With the guidance of these men they attacked and
plundered from the rear the Spanish settlements of
Panama, and then returned across the isthmus to
Drake's ships at Porto Belo. Hence, Drake — Draco
or "the Dragon," as the Spaniards called tiim-
sailed along the north coast of South America to
the rich and beautiful town of Cartagena in what
is now called Colombia. Cartagena was taken by
surprise and plundered, and Drake returned to
England in 1673 with his two small vessels loaded
with valuable booty.

One of the officers, John Oxenham, who served
with Drake on this bold venture, resolved to forestall
his commander in the exploration of the Southern
Sea. He therefore got away from England in the
year 1575 in a ship of one hundred and forty tons,
with seventy soldiers and seamen. They met at
first with wonderful success and were actually
returning from the Pacific coast of America across

6

Francis Drake

the Panama isthmus (laden with gold and silver
which they had captured from Spanish vessels)
when they were followed up by a Spanish force, and
all of them destroyed with the exception of five boys,
whom the Spaniards kept as prisoners. Drake,
therefore, angered and made suspicious by this
unhappy forestalment of his scheme, kept his plans
very secret, and suspected treachery even amongst
those whom he should have trusted. The wealth
he had obtained from his successful piracy of 1572
had procured him an introduction to Queen Eliza-
beth, who eventually, after some hesitation, gave him
a commission to seek for the South Sea in 1577. ^e
was now in command of a fleet of five ships manned
by one hundred and sixty-four officers and men.
The largest of these vessels (afterwards named the
Golden Hinde) was only one hundred tons in burden,
equivalent in size to a small schooner yacht at the
present day. The smallest of his vessels was only
fifteen tons, a little sailing-boat in which a prudent
person would scarcely like to venture very far out-
side the mouth of the Thames or the more sheltered
parts of the British Channel. Yet in these small
ships Drake was to attempt a direct voyage across
the Atlantic to the coast of South America, the
rounding of that continent through the appalling
seas and storms off Cape Horn, and the circum-
navigation of the globe by way of the Pacific and the
Indian Oceans. His plans, however, were carefully
thought out, and his ships were well provisioned in
every way. He even took with him rich furniture

7

A Gallery of Heroes and Heroines

for the cabins of the larger vessels, a table service of
pure silver, and a company of expert musicians.

After visiting the coast of Morocco and the Cape
Verde Islands (where he noted the coconuts and
the cultivated bananas already introduced by the
Portuguese), and capturing a Portuguese ship, out of
which he took a most useful pilot, he reached the
coast of South America off the estuary of the Rio de
la Plata, near where stands the modern city of
Buenos Aires. The Portuguese pilot was to show
him the way south to the entrance to the celebrated
Straits of Magellan. Drake made some stay on the
coast of Patagonia, where he came into conflict with
the tall natives, who made treacherous attacks on
his landing parties; where also he beheld large
flocks of the rhea, a South American ostrich-like
bird of large size. The tall Patagonians lived for
the most part on the flesh of the rhea, and when
Drake plundered one of their camps he carried off
the dried carcasses of about fifty rheas, which proved
a useful addition to his provisions. On the coast of
Patagonia, however, Drake was guilty of something
like a judicial murder. He had amongst his officers
a man of high education and great distinction,
Thomas Doughty, who seems to have displeased
some of the high authorities in England, and to
have been sent away with Drake in the hope that
he would never return. Drake, not long after his
departure from Plymouth, had on several occasions
forced quarrels on this unfortunate man, and by the
time they reached Patagonia he was virtually under

8

Francis Drake

arrest, and made to travel under most uncomfort-
able conditions in the prize ship taken from the
Portuguese. At Port St. Julian, on the coast of
Patagonia, he was brought to trial by Drake on the
charge of conspiring to foment a mutiny. He was
tried by a jury, which — coerced and frightened by
Drake — brought in a verdict of guilty; and Drake
thereupon, against the wishes of most of his followers,
had him executed.

Then resuming the voyage he passed through the
Straits of Magellan and emerged into the Pacific,
not sailing as far to the north as possible towards
the temperate region of Chile, but entering into the
Pacific Ocean off Tierra del Fuego. Terrible storms
bore the two remaining vessels of his fleet south-
wards, till at last Drake, on the Golden Hinde,
realised they were in a vast open sea beyond the
extremity of South America, and that there was
no Antarctic Continent anywhere near them. The
officers of the Christopher (the other surviving vessel)
were so alarmed at the appalling waves and the
frightful rocks of this inhospitable coast, that as
soon as they could fight their way northwards again
to the vicinity of Magellan Straits they re-entered
these smoother waters and sailed eastwards into the
Atlantic, and so returned to England. But Drake
obstinately held on his way north-westwards, fol-
lowing the trend of South America till he reached
islands off the coast of Chile, where they were
able to obtain provisions from Amerindians or
Spaniards. Then he resumed his freebooting career,

A Gallery of Heroes and Heroines

landed and put to ransom several Spanish towns,
and captured Spanish ships off the coast of Peru or
Panama laden with gold and silver or with valuable
cargo from China. Bearing continually northwards,
Drake at last reached about forty-eight degrees N.
latitude, but found the cold here so severe, even
though it was the beginning of June, that he turned
his ship about just before he might have reached
the great opening of the straits of Juan de Fuca.
Sailing southwards again in search of a better
climate and a resting-place, he entered what was
probably the harbour of San Francisco. Here he
remained till the end of July, 1579. The Amerindian
natives of this region made great friends with the
crew of Drake's one ship and worshipped Drake
himself as though he had been a god. From these
Indians Drake received information which caused
him to predict a great wealth of gold in the interior,
a curiously accurate prophecy not to be fulfilled till
nearly three hundred years afterwards.

From the coast of Southern California Drake
boldly steered his course across the unknown Pacific
Ocean. This indeed was an instance of sublime
courage and self-confidence, though of course he
had some slight and vague tradition of Magellan's
voyage to support him in his belief that he might
reach England by circumnavigating the globe. With
little incident or difficulty his vessel of one hundred
tons (first named the Pelican, and then renamed by
Drake the Golden Hinde after he had passed the
Straits of Magellan) crossed the Pacific at its

10

Francis Drake

broadest, and came to anchor in the Spice Islands
in the harbour of the small island of Ternate, one of
the Moluccas archipelago. Fortunately for Drake,
England was then on friendly terms with Portugal;
and the Portuguese — the dominant European people
at that date in the Malay archipelago — showed him
no active hostility. He rested and refreshed his
men on the coast of Java, and from there sailed to
and round the Cape of Good Hope, the coast of
Guinea, the Azores archipelago, and England.

Soon after he reached the Thames Queen Eliza-
beth deigned to visit his little ship at Deptford.
Drake offered her a sumptuous banquet on board,
at the close of which she conferred on him the
honour of knighthood. This wonderful voyage of
Drake effectually demonstrated the weakness of the
Spanish and Portuguese claim to the selfish use of
the most wonderful and productive regions of the
earth's surface. It was an historical event of the
utmost importance, not only to the future British
Empire, but to the world at large.

Francis Drake was one of the greatest men in
the annals of our country. Though merely the son
of a Devonshire farmer born in the first half of the
sixteenth century, he was truly of Shakespeare's time
and spirit, with an imagination, a power of expres-
sion and a refinement of language denoting great
self-education, keen observation, and a close reading
of all obtainable books. He was fastidious in dress,
and of good morals, but he loved beauty in all forms

-in music, in furniture, in costume, and could appre-

ii

A Gallery of Heroes and Heroines

ciate also beauty in scenery. He was not himself
handsome or romantic in appearance. He was
scarcely taller than five feet six inches, had a large
head, a broad, short face, a short, blunt nose, and
reddish-brown hair and beard. Yet there was some-
thing in his bearing, the glance of his eye, perhaps
most of all in his apt and vigorous speech, which
greatly impressed the men with whom he was
associated. He was in fact a born commander.
Although the greatest event of his life was the cir-
cumnavigation of the globe, he lived long afterwards
to perform prodigies of valour and seamanship. He
took a leading part in the war which raged between
Spain and England from 1585 onwards, attacking
and plundering their ships or their cities on the
coast of Spain, or on the great West India islands or
in northern South America ; but at last he met his
fate. Attempting once again, this time with seven
hundred and fifty soldiers, to conquer the isthmus
of Panama, he was severely defeated and obliged to
retreat to his ship at Nombre de Dios. Here he
died from fatigue and fever on January 28, 1596. He
was buried at sea off the coast of a little island near
the boundary between the modern states of Panama
and Costa Rica.

12

WALTER RALEIGH

WE have seen that the spell of
Spanish exclusiveness of dominion,
both over the New World and the
far east of Asia, was broken by the
wonderful voyage of Sir Francis
Drake. Whilst Drake still lived,
his schemes for the participation
of Great Britain in American dis-
covery and settlement were to be taken up by Sir
Walter Raleigh.

Walter Raleigh was of Devonshire origin, like
Drake and Hawkins. He was born near Budleigh
Salterton, the fourth son of a country gentleman.
When he was about fourteen he went to Oxford
University, and was a student at that same college
of Oriel which, in the nineteenth century, was to
educate another great pioneer of the British Empire,
Cecil Rhodes. Like most of the great men of his
day, Raleigh was precocious. He considered him-
self a grown-up man when he was seventeen, and
at that age volunteered for warfare in France to
assist the Huguenots in their struggle against their
Catholic rulers. He spent in this way nearly six
years on and about the west coast of France. When,
however, Queen Elizabeth abandoned the attempt
to interfere in French affairs on behalf of the Pro-

13

A Gallery of Heroes and Heroines

testants, Raleigh returned to England and entered
as a law student in the Middle Temple. Here
amongst other studies he took up the Spanish
language, in the reading, writing, and speaking of
which he subsequently became proficient. With
his mind more than ever bent on adventure, he took
part with his half-brother, Sir Humphrey Gilbert,
in that unsuccessful expedition to colonise North
America, which — though it seemed to fail at the
time — nevertheless laid the foundation of the United
States. He next went as an officer of the army
to fight against the Spaniards who had landed in
Ireland. Returning from these wars he somehow
attracted the attention of Queen Elizabeth, whether
by spreading his cloak to cover a puddle at Green-
wich or otherwise, real history does not say. But
he became one of her most assiduous courtiers, his
good looks pleased her eye, and his ready wit her
clever mind. She put him in the way of making
money, possibly by giving him one of those monopo-
lies with which she enabled her subjects to enrich
themselves at no extra cost to herself.

But however he may have gained his money,
Raleigh made a noble use of it in attempts to
found a British Empire beyond the seas. He twice
financed expeditions for the colonisation of North
America, the more important of which was the one
that founded a British settlement on the coast of
North Carolina, a region which Raleigh christened
Virginia in honour of Queen Elizabeth, though it
lay outside the area that was subsequently attri-

14

Walter Raleigh

buted to the State of that name. Owing to the
hostility of the Spaniards and other circumstances,
this colonising scheme was given up; but Raleigh's
settlers did not all die, they were received with
friendship by the Indians, intermarried with them,
and their half - breed descendants continued for
generations and centuries as a semi-savage com-
munity, only recently absorbed in the population of
North Carolina, which State has very rightly given
the name of Raleigh to its capital city.

Raleigh had given to these ventures over £40,000,
which was a very large sum for a private individual
to expend in those times, and all the money thus
laid out was lost to him. Perhaps the only tangible
results were a few seed potatoes and parcels of
tobacco. Such of Raleigh's colonists who returned
to England, brought back with them the practice
of smoking this fragrant herb, a practice Raleigh
thenceforth adopted whenever he could get tobacco
to put in his pipe. As to the potatoes, he planted
them on his estate in the county of Cork, and
possibly may have been the original introducer of
the potato into Ireland.

He also spent his money freely on the purchase
of Spanish and Portuguese manuscripts and printed
books, which he handed over to the celebrated
Richard Hakluyt, of London, for translation and
publication. He agitated continually for the estab-
lishment of a really strong English fleet, pointing
out that if England possessed a sufficiency of power-
ful war vessels, no power in the world could conquer

'5 3

A Gallery of Heroes and Heroines

her at home, while without a strong fleet no land
fortifications were of much use. Moreover, if Eng-
land could obtain the mastery of the seas she could
pick and choose as regards American settlements
and colonisation. His thoughts, however, were in
later days not so much concentrated on the found-
ing of colonies as the actual procuring of gold, silver,
and precious stones. When he was about forty
years old he got into great trouble with Queen Eliza-
beth over his matrimonial affairs, and for two years
was quite out of favour. His desire to get back into
her good graces and to re-establish himself in power
and wealth, rather warped and vitiated his plans.
He had become unconsciously as greedy of wealth
and as unscrupulous as to the means of obtaining
it as the Spaniards and Portuguese whom he re-
proached in his writings.

Of course he read Spanish with ease and wrote
it with some fluency and correctness. Of all the
European languages and the daughters of Latin it
is the easiest to acquire. His continual reading of
works published abroad in Spanish, French, and
German, or of the translations issued by Hakluyt,
caused him to conceive the notion of piercing the
Spanish armour in the New World where it was
weakest, in the region of Guiana.

Far in the interior of Guiana, in the direction of
the Amazon River, or in the hinterland of what we
now call Venezuela, there existed, he believed, an
Indian monarchy of such tremendous wealth in
gold and silver, but especially in gold, that if it

16

Walter Raleigh

could only be tapped and drained it would enrich
his sovereign (and incidentally himself) and make
her the most powerful prince in Christendom.
Though he exaggerated and twisted these accounts
derived from Spaniards and the early German colon-
ists sent out by Charles V. to northern South
America, there was yet some degree of truth behind
his fantastic geography of Guiana and the basin of
the Orinoco, and of the country ruled over by the
Amerindian chief whom the Spaniards called El
Dorado, or " The Golden." No doubt in the wonder-
ful kingdom of the Chibchas, in Northern Colombia,
there had existed a great wealth in gold and silver,
and the chiefs and the principal monarchy of the
country had made a remarkable display of this
wealth, not only gilding their bodies, but using gold
and silver for many kinds of ornaments and for
utensils.

Raleigh began his direct investigations in 1594 by
sending a small ship under Captain Whiddon to
examine the approaches to Guiana, that is to say,
the coast from Trinidad to the mouth of the Orinoco.
Guiana (properly "Guayana ") really lay to the south
of the Orinoco mouth, and was a debatable region
occupied neither by the Spaniards nor the Portu-
guese, because it was still uncertain whether it lay
within the limits of Brazil or of Spanish America.
The Spaniards and Portuguese, who discovered the
New World almost simultaneously, had composed
their differences by accepting the decision of a pope,
who fixed on an arbitrary degree of longitude at

17

A Gallery of Heroes and Heroines

several hundred leagues west of the Cape Verde
Islands as the dividing line between the new pos-
sessions of the kingdoms of Castille and Portugal.*
The Portuguese discovery and occupation of Brazil
naturally proceeded with some slowness, owing to
the preoccupation of the Portuguese with Africa
and India. The Spaniards on their part considered
Guiana (but not the Orinoco River) as lying more
or less outside their sphere of influence. This coast,
therefore, was a favourable region at the close of the
sixteenth century, both for English and Dutch
adventurers. On the other hand, Trinidad, the large
West India island near the mouth of the Orinoco,
was emphatically a Spanish possession.

Captain Whiddon brought back a favourable
report from the Orinoco delta, and Raleigh accord-
ingly rapidly organised an expedition to take posses-
sion of that region, and left England in command of
it in February, 1595. One of his ships was lost on
the way, but with the four larger ones he reached
Trinidad, after a speedy sailing voyage, and some-
what treacherously took posession of it, making the
Spanish Governor prisoner. This governor he took
with him as a hostage, an unwilling guest, but an
agreeable travelling companion. His expedition
consisted of a hundred men and an Amerindian
pilot, who had promised to lead them through the
mazes of the Orinoco delta to the mountain regions

* Afterwards in the Treaty of Tordesillas, this line across the globe from
north to south was drawn at 370 leagues (1,110 miles) west of the Cape Verde
archipelago.

18

Walter Raleigh

inland. They were received at first with hostility
by the natives, who besides having to be constantly
on guard against the attacks of the warlike and
cannibal Caribs, had already suffered much from
the Spaniards, and were getting to hate the sight of
white men entering their paradise of fruit-trees and
gorgeously plumaged birds--a paradise well-stocked
with food in the form of fish, deer, game, birds, and
palm - trees which furnished tender, cabbage - like
young fronds, nuts, and sweet sap. When Raleigh
and his men got well away from the mangrove belt
on the seacoast they thought the country was the
most beautiful their eyes had ever beheld. Much
of it was dense forest, but here and there were plains
of short green grass decked with groves of handsome
trees, in which the deer fed peacefully as they might
have done in an English park.

After fifteen days' voyaging in their cumbersome
old galley (the other ships had been left behind
at Trinidad), they actually descried far-off moun-
tains, the Imataka Hills (on the north-west border-
land of what is now British Guiana). They reached
as far up the main stream of the Orinoco as enabled
them to behold the region of the vast plains or llanos
which cover so much of the basin of the Orinoco,
between the Venezuela mountains on the north and
the Andes on the south-west. During the rainy
season this region of endless hummocky plains,
with long grass, scanty shrubs, and scrubby trees,
presented the aspect of a sea of verdure ; but during
the summer it was a picture of desolation, owing to

19

A Gallery of Heroes and Heroines

the effects of drought and the burning rays of an
equatorial sun. The people inhabiting these plains
in Raleigh's day were much darker in skin colour
than the graceful, good-looking Arawaks and Caribs
of the forests and mountains. In Raleigh's time
the Orinoco tribes defended themselves with their
poisoned arrows, a wound from which was nearly
always fatal. From one or two of their people
Raleigh heard stories which confirmed him in his
belief that he was on the threshold of " El Dorado,"
the Land of Gold ; for vast as the distance was that
separated the regions of the lower Orinoco from the
slopes of the Northern Andes, Raleigh heard from
this naked people accounts of other Amerindian
tribes living in the west which were clothed from
head to foot, which wrought the precious metals
into wonderful ornaments, and used stone for
building.

As a matter of fact, the Spanish pioneers were
already penetrating the northern parts of Guiana to
the south of the Orinoco, and bringing thence gold
in small quantities, and stories of diamonds or
precious stones. Raleigh got no farther towards
Guiana than the Falls of Karoni, where he collected
stones which seemed to him to contain gold. On
his return journey to the coast he ran many risks
from the flooded river and the terrible gales of wind.
Though his galley was very nearly wrecked off the
mouth of the Orinoco, he managed, nevertheless,
to sail her across to Trinidad, where he found the
other three ships at anchor awaiting him.

20

Walter Raleigh

The whole of this expedition from England
across the Atlantic, up the Orinoco to the foothills
of Guiana, back again to Trinidad and once more
across the ocean to the English Channel, only occu-
pied a space of nine months. Raleigh immediately
after his return published an account of his voyage,
which is written in such a roundabout fashion, with
so many pages of pompous and boastful writing,
that it is difficult to trace the actual course of his
journey. Nevertheless, his book is still interesting
to read, and the information he collected about the
geography, the people, and the beasts, birds, and
reptiles of the eastern parts of the Orinoco basin,
was usually accurate ; though, not content with the
wonders he saw with his own eyes, or heard of from
the Spaniards, he stuck in a few extra beasts which
do not exist in South America at all — lions and
tigers, and so forth. One realises from reading his
story that he was not what we should call an heroic
traveller, like other pioneers of the same century.
He was evidently a bad marcher, and consequently
disinclined to go far from the banks of any stream
where he could travel in canoes or on board ship.

Two months after his return to England he sent
back two ships under the command of Captain
Lawrence Keymis. Keymis actually reached the
coast of Guiana proper, east of the Orinoco basin,
and here found some of Raleigh's Amerindian ser-
vants and pilots who had settled there to be out of
the reach of Spanish reprisals. With their guidance
he sailed north to the Orinoco delta. Coming out

21

A Gallery of Heroes and Heroines

into the open sea, to his great surprise he met his
little pinnace called the Discoverer, a boat of be-
tween twelve and fifteen tons, which he had lost
sight of in the Bay of Biscay, but which had,
nevertheless, pluckily sailed on across the tropical
Atlantic with a strong wind behind her, and had
made the voyage from the Cape Verde Islands to
Guiana in only twelve days. The Discoverer was
commanded by Captain William Downe. Here
was a hero for you, if you like ! How many of us
at the present day would care to leave Plymouth
for the coast of South America in a tiny sailing-
boat ?

After 1596 many matters came in the way which
obscured Raleigh's interest in the colonisation of
Guiana. He fought in the wars with Spain, he was
made Governor of Jersey, and became a Member of
Parliament for Penzance. After James I. came to
the throne he was charged with conspiracy. In
reality James wished to curry favour with Spain,
and therefore determined to exile from Court or
persecute those who had taken a prominent part in
the recent Spanish war. Raleigh was in conse-
quence tried for his life at Winchester in the
autumn of 1603, and, by the influence of the King
over the Court, was pronounced guilty and sen-
tenced to death. The execution of his sentence,
however, was deferred, pending the King's pleasure,
and he was meantime incarcerated in the Tower of
London. There he remained an unhappy, fretting
prisoner for thirteen years, occupying himself by

22

Walter Raleigh

compiling a history of the world, and writing many
other books, pamphlets, and poems, and by making
experiments in chemistry. Naturally, he fretted to
regain his freedom of action and sought to conciliate
the base-minded King James by arguments that
would appeal to him. He revived his great scheme
of discovering gold-mines in Guiana, and assured
the King through his emissaries that he could locate
these mines outside the limits of Spanish territory.
King James pretended to believe that this was pos-
sible, though Raleigh's assurance was in reality an
impossibility. Of course, all that the King cared for
was the chance of getting a great store of treasure
that would make him more independent of his Par-
liament. Accordingly, without remitting Raleigh's
death sentence, he allowed him to leave the Tower
as a prisoner on parole to take command of an
expedition of five ships. However, on account of
the remonstrances made by the Spanish Ambassador,
he warned Raleigh that if in the prosecution of this
search he was guilty of piratical attacks on the
Spaniards he would forfeit his life. Raleigh prom-
ised anything and everything, and gave these assur-
ances in the belief that once he got to Guiana he
would discover the gold and all else would be for-
given him. Accordingly, he sailed from England in
March, 1617, but with a very unruly and ill-provided
expedition. In the course of the voyage he was
taken seriously ill, so that when they reached
Trinidad, which was once more captured from the
Spaniards, he himself stayed there. Five of his

23 4

A Gallery of Heroes and Heroines

ships went up the Orinoco under the command of
Lawrence Keymis, his friend and fellow voyager of
more than twenty years before. On the way to the
Karoni River, up which they intended to journey
into Guiana, they found themselves stopped by a
Spanish fortified settlement. This they attacked,
and in the fight that followed, Sir Walter Raleigh's
son was killed. Keymis and his followers found no
mine, and were harassed by fighting in the thick
bush with the Spaniards and with their Amerindian
allies. At last, wearied and disheartened, they re-
turned to their ships and made their way back
to Trinidad. Raleigh, learning of his son's death
and of the utter failure of the expedition, assailed
Lawrence Keymis with such bitter reproaches that
the latter went away from his presence and com-
mitted suicide. As Raleigh now knew his own life
to be forfeited, and as he was not an over-scrupulous
man in some other directions, it is curious that his
sense of honour obliged him to return to England
and surrender himself to the King's judgment. Per-
haps he was unable to induce his seamen to adopt
any other course, otherwise he might well have
landed on the coast of France, and even have made
his way to North Italy, in both of which regions
he had powerful friends. As it was, King James
showed him no pity, and he was executed not long
after his return on October 29, 1618, meeting his end
with a serene dignity which went far to atone for
his earlier boastfulness and duplicity. In any case,

he was a far worthier creature than the miserable

24

Walter Raleigh

monarch who sent him to the block after attempting
to make use of him to filch gold from South America.
The remembrance of Raleigh's Guiana expeditions
did not die away. It is true that the Dutch in their
long war with the Spaniards established themselves
as rulers on the Guiana coast, but British ships
continued to visit this region and make settlements
there in the seventeenth century. At last, in 1796,
the British Government, which had more than once
occupied this possession of a Dutch company, finally
took charge of it and annexed the northern part of
Guiana to the British Crown in 1806, leaving to
the Dutch and French the other divisions of this
debatable region between the colonising forces of
Spain and Portugal. Trinidad also had been taken
earlier still, and Tobago likewise. Raleigh, there-
fore, whilst on the one hand he played a prominent
part in the expeditions which were to found the
United States, was in some ways the originator of
our remarkable West Indian Empire.

25

JAMES WOLFE OF QUEBEC

NOT long after the discovery of
America by Columbus, Cabot,
Cabral, and Amerigo Vespucci, it
was realised that a new world
had been revealed ; not merely
the far eastern shores of Asia and

^ Australasia. Magellan's passage

^ •• through the straits which now
bear his name, and the circumnavigation of the
globe by the surviving ship of his expedition, defi-
nitely settled that question and revealed to the
eagerly watching peoples of Western Europe the
possibilities of trade with the Far East by the route
of the Far West. However, the great dip through
the stormy seas of the south necessary for passing
the Straits of Magellan inspired first the French
and next the English with the longing to discover
a north-west passage, a sea route round or through
North America from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
Jacques Cartier, a bold navigator of Brittany, started
on such an errand in 1534, rediscovered Newfound-
land and Labrador (already reached by English and
Portuguese ships), entered the Gulf of St. Lawrence,
and sailed up that river to Quebec and " Canada '
as he called the region where the great St. Lawrence

narrowed from a vast estuary to a broad river.

26

James Wolfe of Quebec

Cartier and his successors founded the trade in furs,
and established the French claim to Canada, or, as
it was called at first, " New France." This claim
was re-established (after an interval of about twenty
years of abandonment) by another great pioneer,
Samuel Champlain ; and from 1603 onwards French
Canada grew from a few settlements on the lower
St. Lawrence to a French North-American Empire
which reached from Nova Scotia almost to the
eastern base of the Rocky Mountains.

But England followed these proceedings with
parallel movements of colonisation. A vague but
intermittent claim, supported by a great fishing
fleet, was constantly laid to the shores of Newfound-
land. About fifty years after Cartier's first enter-
prise, expeditions under Amadas, Barlowe, and
Bartholomew Gosnold discovered the coasts of
North Carolina, Virginia, and Massachusetts; and
a few years after Champlain, in 1603, had com-
menced the actual French colonisation of Eastern
Canada, the Pilgrim Fathers of Eastern and Southern
England (in the reign of Charles I.) founded those
settlements on the eastern coast of North America
which grew by degrees into the United States.

In the reign of Charles II. some definiteness was
given to the schemes of other bold adventurers, who,
taking no heed of French claims to sovereignty over
all North America, were boldly carrying on a fur
trade from Newfoundland and Labrador, round the
shores of that Hudson's Bay which had been dis-
covered in 1610 by the great English navigator,

27

A Gallery of Heroes and Heroines

Henry Hudson. In the revival of imperialism
which followed the re-establishment of the English
monarchy under Charles II., a charter was given to
the English fur traders who became the Hudson's
Bay Company. Thus in the seventeenth century
the French colonisation of the valley of the St.
Lawrence River and the shores of Lakes Ontario,
Erie, and Huron, was balanced on the north by the
English fur-trading settlements of Hudson's Bay
and Labrador, and on the south by the New Eng-
land colonies. But the French, pushing westwards,
passed beyond the great Lake Superior to the upper
waters of the Mississippi, and guessed that in this
river and its mighty affluent the Missouri, there
were water-ways from the heart of Canada down to
the Gulf of Mexico. Early in the eighteenth cen-
tury, despite angry opposition from Spain, a French
colony — Louisiana, with its capital of New Orleans
-was founded on the delta of the Mississippi, and
French authority more or less was established all
the way up the course of that stream ; so that by
means of the French control of the Mississippi a
western barrier was put to any British expansion
westwards from New England. The French King
even claimed that his rule should extend some day
from the Mississippi to the Pacific Ocean north of
the Spanish possessions in California.

In short, it seemed in the early part of the
eighteenth century that France and not Britain
would rule in North America. The two countries

were almost incessantly at war on one pretext or

28

James Wolfe of Quebec

another, and very often the quarrels between the
French colonists in Canada and Louisiana and the
British pioneers of Hudson's Bay, of Newfoundland
and New England, were a fresh incitement to war-
fare. At last, owing to their superiority in sea
power and the fighting qualities of the New Eng-
land settlers, the British began to get the upper
hand, while the French slowly lost interest in their
over-sea possessions. Even if they won a battle in
America their defeats elsewhere entailed on them
the sacrifice of one portion of Canada after another.
First they had to surrender all claims to Newfound-
land (except the tiny islands off its south coast still
under the French flag). Secondly, they lost Nova
Scotia and New Brunswick, including their great
fortified place of Louisbourg. The fear of having to
surrender Louisiana to the British caused France
to transfer that country to Spain.

Her last great stronghold in North America
(from which of course with any favourable turn of
events in Europe she might once more have built
up her vast American Empire) was Canada proper,
the basin of the St. Lawrence River, that is to say,
the region between Lake Superior, Lakes Erie and
Ontario, Montreal and Quebec. But in 1756 the
seven years' war broke out between Britain on the
one hand, Spain and France on the other. It was
resolved then to take advantage of this war pro-
voked by the conflicting colonial ambitions of
France, Britain, and Spain, to conquer the whole of
Canada from the French, and make Great Britain

29 5

A Gallery of Heroes and Heroines

the only ruling power of any importance on the
North American Continent. This aim was natu-
rally prompted by the growing success of the British
colonisation of eastern North America, where the
population in the middle of the eighteenth century
was a million as compared to the sixty thousand or
seventy thousand French in Canada.

But the French, though they were few in num-
bers, were brave and resourceful, perhaps at that
period the finest soldiers in Europe, and the most
advanced on the scientific side of war. Their two
strong places were Quebec and Montreal, separated
the one from the other by only about two hundred
miles, a trifling distance in the vastness of North
America. If Quebec could be taken by a British
force whilst Great Britain possessed the necessary
vigour and the command of the sea, the French
dominion over Canada was doomed.

But the place — once or twice captured by the
British in earlier periods of Canadian history — had
long been prepared for such a struggle, and was
fortified with all the engineering art that the French
had developed in the eighteenth century. The city
was built on the extremity of a rocky headland
which rises abruptly from the banks of the St.
Lawrence to a height of three hundred and thirty-
three feet. To the east of this precipitous tableland
is a little river, the St. Charles, which in those days
was a sufficient defence against an attacking force.
A series of strong fortifications defended any ap-
proach of artillery to the town and citadel of Quebec

30

James Wolfe of Quebec

on the north side. To the west lay the elevated
" Plains of Abraham," from which indeed a damaging
attack could be made, but which were thought to be
so inaccessible from the riverside that they were
not properly fortified in that direction.

This great crisis in the history of English-speak-
ing North America found a man fit to cope with it
-James Wolfe.

James Wolfe was born at Westerham, on the
borders of Kent and Surrey, on January 2, 1727.
Although he was a delicate boy he was born with
an ardent desire for adventure and achievement.
His father was a colonel in the British Army, and
when James was only thirteen years old he actually
accompanied him on a military expedition to Carta-
gena, in Spain. After his return with his father to
England, though he was only fourteen years of age,
he was made an ensign in the British Army, and
the next year at the age of fifteen — a slight and deli-
cate lad — he proceeded with his regiment to the
Rhine to take part in the wars waged by George II.
against France. At the battle of Dettingen he be-
haved with such bravery and ability that he was
made a lieutenant. By the time he was seventeen
he was actually a captain, and had the acting rank
of major when he took part in putting down the
1745 rebellion in Scotland and Northern England.
He next fought as an officer in the British Army
sent to Belgium, and had become a lieutenant-
colonel in the year 1750 at the age of twenty-three.
During a brief interval of peace with France he

31

A Gallery of Heroes and Heroines

made his way to Paris and lived there for six
months, endeavouring to acquire not only fluency
in the French language, but an acquaintance with
French military science. When a new war broke
out in 1755 he took part in an expedition which was
to attack the sea-town of Rochefort, and endeavour
to foment an insurrection of the French Protestants
in the west of France. The expedition, however,
was badly managed, and against Wolfe's advice,
and resulted in a complete failure.

In 1758, James Wolfe was sent as a brigadier-
general to North America in the forces under the
general command of Lord Amherst. The first object
of this comparatively powerful army sent across the
Atlantic to attack the French in North America
was to recapture the important fortress of Louis-
bourg on Cape Breton Island, a fortress command-
ing the southern entrance into the Gulf of St.
Lawrence, and the most important hold which the
French possessed on the western shores of the north
Atlantic. Louisbourg had been captured by the
British settlers in North America some years pre-
viously, but had been restored to France on the
conclusion of peace. Without Louisbourg France
could not hope to retain free access to the colony of
Canada, nor without capturing it was any British
attack on Canada likely to succeed. The fighting,
therefore, was terrific on both sides, but the place
was besieged for some weeks and finally taken by a
series of assaults, the foremost of which were led by
Wolfe himself. His health, however, never good,

32

James Wolfe of Quebec

suffered greatly from the hardships he underwent,
and he returned to England after the surrender of
Louisbourg to recruit his health, proceeding to do
so at Bath, which has been the resort of so many
British heroes during the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. Here he got engaged to be married, but
soon afterwards, hearing that a determined attack
was to be made to finish the struggle with France
and North America for the capture of Quebec and
Montreal, he at once offered to return. His offer
was only too gladly accepted by the great minister,
Pitt, who appreciated his talents, and it was decided
that Wolfe, now made a major-general, should take
command of the Quebec expedition. He therefore
returned to Louisbourg in the spring of 1759, and on
June i in that year he started for Quebec with a
force of seven thousand troops, and a great fleet of
warships and gunboats.

This fleet sailed unopposed up the gulf and
estuary of the St. Lawrence, and disembarked the
British forces on the Isle of Orleans, which, with
another smaller island, lies in the middle of the
broad St. Lawrence, just where the great estuary
narrows into the tidal river. Point Levis, on the
south side of the St. Lawrence and to the south-east
of Quebec, was first of all captured by Wolfe. From
here he attempted to bombard the city and induce
it to surrender; but the distance was much too
great for the artillery of those days, and the results
were ineffective. Wolfe's next plan was to cross to
the north side of the St. Lawrence, approach the

33

A Gallery of Heroes and Heroines

city by the St. Charles River, and get at the back of
its defences in that way ; but such a very palpable
line of attack had long since been thought out by the
French, and was guarded by fortified posts which
made it impossible. Wolfe attacked one of these
lines of fortification known as the Montmorency,
but was repulsed on the last day of July, 1769, with
such a heavy loss that he almost gave way to des-
pair. All this time he was suffering agonies of pain
from an internal disease, and the defeat of July 31
made his illness acute. But he realised in all prob-
ability he had not long to live, and was determined
to die victorious. He held several councils of war,
and debated all possible means of getting up with-
out too great a loss of life on to the plateau of Quebec
from the north side, and so being able to command
the city with his artillery.

Collecting all possible information from his
scouts and from the examination of the northern
shore of the river by the gunboats, he decided to land
as large a force as he could spare at a little cove to
the west of Quebec. From this point he had ascer-
tained that it was just possible for determined men
to scramble up the precipitous cliffs along a path
which would lead to the dominating Heights of
Abraham. The watchfulness of the great French
commander, Montcalm, was deceived because the
British expedition of boats (conveying the 3,600 men,
their artillery, and stores) proceeded ostentatiously
much higher up the St. Lawrence than the little
cove at which they were finally to land. They

34

James Wolfe of Quebec

behaved, in fact, as though they were going to
abandon Quebec for the time being and attack the
city of Montreal, far to the west. But as soon as the
summer night was completely dark, and the dawn
not too far off — that is to say, at one in the morning
-General Wolfe, with about 1,300 men, dropped
down the stream again in boats, the intensest silence
being observed as the muffled oars were plied. They
landed at Wolfe's Cove, as it is now called, and still
in utter silence, and in the faint light of a summer
dawn, climbed the precipitous cliffs, leaving the
actual path (which was guarded by one or two out-
posts), and reaching the summit in extended order.
Then they rapidly concentrated, and soon overcame
the garrisons of the small fortified posts. They were
speedily followed by the other half of the force of
3,600 men. Wolfe by this time had become a spirit
almost independent of a weak and ailing body. He
forgot his dire illness and its cruel pains, and applied
his energies to directing the operations that were so
urgent if they were to get their artillery up to the
plateau above the cliffs and be able to meet the
inevitable French attack in force. This had been
held off for a time by the clever manoeuvres of
Admiral Saunders, who was making a demonstra-
tion on the part of his fleet far away to the east of
Quebec. In this direction, therefore, the French
commander, Montcalm, had sent the greater part of
his available forces, thinking that the Montmorency
River might otherwise be crossed by the British.
To his horror, however, he was told, when it was

35

A Gallery of Heroes and Heroines

fully morning on September 13, that a body of
British troops was encamped on the plains of Abra-
ham. He hurried to meet them, and at first repulsed
the skirmishers and the light infantry. But the
British, having no chance of escape if they were
defeated, with their backs, so to speak, against a
precipice, and, above all, animated by Wolfe's
sublime example of cool, undaunted courage, con-
centrated themselves to meet the great charge of the
French. When at close quarters they delivered
deadly volleys, and took advantage of the first arrest
of the French impetus (produced by the slaughter
in their front ranks) to hurl themselves at the
enemy. Wolfe, already wounded in two places, led
the great charge, and was shot through the lungs.
But the French commander, Montcalm, was also
wounded to the death. The French wavered, turned,
retreated, and at last ran towards the fortifications
of the upper town. The loss of life amongst them
was tremendous. Wolfe, rallying from the blood
that choked his utterance, gasped out a final order
for cutting off the French retreat ; then, exclaiming,
"Now, God be praised! I will die in peace," he
expired.

Five days afterwards the fortress of Quebec sur-
rendered, and, although the French still fought on
in Canada, the blow was decisive. All Canada
passed under the British flag at the conclusion of
peace in 1763. The bravery of the French and the
real worth of the French Canadians impressed even
the stupid Ministers of George III., so that honour-

36

James Wolfe of Quebec

able terms were offered them for their transference
of allegiance. The efforts of France to colonise
North America have no more been thrown away
than the efforts of England, Scotland, and Ireland
to do the same. The French language is spoken by
a couple of millions of Canadians at the present day,
and by a million or so of United States citizens in
Louisiana, and French influence has counted for
much in the development of North America. Prob-
ably it seems to us at the present day, in the twen-
tieth century, a mighty waste of valour, acuteness,
and science that two such men as James Wolfe and
Louis Joseph Montcalm de St. Veran should have
perished in the wars of their rival nations. But the
gain of the British cause through the splendid, the
rarely equalled, personal bravery of Wolfe, and his
genius as a commander, counted for much at that
crisis in the world's history for the enlargement of
freedom and the betterment of the human race.

ir

37

CAPTAIN JAMES COOK

THE marvellous voyages of
Magellan and of Francis Drake
across the great Pacific Ocean (on
the one hand, from the coast of
Chile, on the other from that of
California, both ending, so far as
Pacific adventure went, in the
Malay Archipelago) were soon fol-
lowed by the explorations of other Portuguese and
Spanish pioneers and of the Dutch, whose war for
independence against Spain, at the close of the six-
teenth century, sent them out as bold sea-rovers
resolved to punish Spain for her cruelties in her
over-sea possessions. The Spaniards more especi-
ally, amongst these great seafarers, began to examine
with interest the islands of the Pacific Ocean.
Before the close of the sixteenth century they had
discovered the greater part of the outline of New
Guinea and of the New Hebrides and Solomon
Islands (thus called by some Spaniard or Portu-
guese because they were thought to be the Ophir
from which Solomon had derived his gold and
scented woods). The Dutch, coming on the scene
and displacing in part the Spaniards and the Portu-
guese, not only made themselves roughly acquainted
with the geography of the Malay Archipelago, but

38

Captain James Cook

were impelled to curiosity concerning what might
lie due south in the wastes of the Indian and Pacific
Oceans. During the seventeenth century they dis-
covered and mapped the coasts of North and West
Australia, Tasmania, and New Zealand, but made
no attempts to colonise those distant and seemingly
inhospitable regions. In fact, interest in regard to a
great Southern Continent and the islands of the
Pacific Ocean somewhat lapsed for a time, and the
region was still bare on the maps of the day, or
occupied by a huge continent which joined Northern
Australia to the Antarctic region beyond South
America. Here, therefore, was plenty of room for
Swift to place the mythical kingdoms that Gulliver
visited.

A great love of science, however, had developed
in England and France between the closing years of
the seventeenth and the middle of the eighteenth
century. It was decided, in order to determine
astronomical measurements, to send out an expedi-
tion to observe the transit of Venus across the sun's
disc in the year 1769; and as it was computed by
astronomers that this could best be observed from
some spot of land in the Pacific Ocean answering
vaguely to a reported island (Tahiti) which had been
discovered by Spanish expeditions, it was decided
by the Royal Society that an expedition should be
sent thither. At first they thought of placing it
under the command of a geographer who had strange
theories about the Antarctic Continent. As the
vessel would have to sail round the southern ex-

39

A Gallery of Heroes and Heroines

tremity of South America, it might well, in addition
to these astronomical observations, seek for traces
of this southern continent, and complete the geo-
graphical work of the Dutch explorers a hundred
years previously. The choice of the Royal Society,
however, lighted on Captain James Cook, who was
accordingly given a commission in the Royal Navy,
and placed in command of a well-furnished ship.
With him was to sail, at his own expense, a person
remarkable in the history of the British Empire-
Sir Joseph Banks — a man of means who was also a
man of science, and who added to the lustre and
renown of Cook's first voyage by his work as a
student of botany, zoology, and ethnology.

James Cook was born at Marton, in the Cleve-
land district of Yorkshire, in the year 1728, the son
of a farm-labourer of Scottish descent. Though he
worked as a boy on the farm, he picked up a smatter-
ing of education. Later on he became apprenticed
to a grocer, but had a great hankering to go to sea.
At last he managed to get his apprenticeship can-
celled and himself placed on board a vessel which
sailed up and down the coast bringing coal from the
north to the coast towns in the south. James Cook
took eagerly to a sea life, and neglected no oppor-
tunities for education. So much did he become
master of his profession as a navigator, and one who
thoroughly understood the working of sailing-ships,
that he became a shipmaster or navigating lieu-
tenant in the Royal Navy in 1755, and was selected

to proceed to North America to survey the St. Law-

40

Captain James Cook

rence estuary and the coasts of Newfoundland. The
work which he did in this direction attracted the
notice of the Admiralty, and this was how he came
to be recommended to the Royal Society to take
command of their scientific expedition, and he was
well fitted to superintend the astronomical observa-
tions they desired and to navigate a vessel through
unknown seas.

Cook, in his ship the Endeavour, reached the
island of Tahiti in April, 1769. It was a wonderful
experience for him and his men. This lovely little
archipelago was like fragments of the earthly para-
dise, but had, it is true, recently been visited by
Spanish and English ships, so that the sight of
white men was not new to its natives. But
never before had they entered into such close and
friendly relations with these wonderful strangers.
All things considered, and largely on account of
Cook's upright and merciful disposition, little harm^
came to them from the prolonged stay of a British
ship in their midst. The observations were taken,
and the Endeavour sailed away, Cook desiring to
cross the Pacific in rather southern latitudes, and
decide once and for all whether there was or was
not a huge southern continent, of which Australia
and New Zealand were mere outlying portions. He
passed few islands of any great note or size until he
sighted the mountains of New Zealand. New Zea-
land hitherto had only, so far as we know, been
visited by white men when it was discovered by the
great navigator Tasman, who, on account of ^

41

A Gallery of Heroes and Heroines

quarrelsome and murderous disposition of its Maori
people, had sailed away without even effecting a
landing. Cook was now to make a thorough survey
of these two great islands and their attendant islets.
After his preliminary examination, he departed to
the west and discovered the east coast of Australia,
which he thought at first might be an independent
island, distinct from what was then called New
Holland (West Australia). It was Cook who first
landed at Botany Bay, who discovered the harbour of
Sydney, and who sailed along the southern coast of
Queensland. Here, on the outskirts of the great
Barrier Reef, his vessel ran upon a rock, and was
very near foundering with all on board. By a mar-
vellous output of energy and skill he saved the
vessel from going to the bottom, and patched up the
leak, so that she could staggeringly sail to the dis-
tant mainland. Here (at Cooktown, Queensland)
she was laid up on shore, and Cook and his people
spent some time examining North-east Australia
and its marvels in the way of beasts, birds, and
plants. When the Endeavour was fit to continue
her voyage, they made their way through the Torres
Straits. This passage between New Guinea and
North Australia Cook believed he was the first
European to discover, though, as a matter of fact,
they had been sailed through by the Spanish
pioneer, Torres, after whom they have since (very
rightly) been named. But all knowledge of this
strait of water between New Guinea and Australia

had faded away ; and when Tasman, the Dutch-

42

Captain James Cook

man, was attempting to survey the coasts of North
Australia, he did not risk his ship through the
Torres Straits, believing that either there was no
open waterway, or even that there was dry land
connecting New Guinea with " New Holland."
Cook proved the contrary, however, so far as the
world's knowledge was concerned. He then made
his way to Java, where he was hospitably received
by the Dutch, and from Java sailed across the Indian
Ocean to the Cape of Good Hope, and thence back
to England.

The interest excited by these discoveries was
very great, but Cook's rewards from his Govern-
ment were a poor return for his courage and re-
sourcefulness and his vast additions to our know-
ledge. He was given very little in the way of
money, and his journals, of surpassing interest, were
handed over by the Admiralty to a needy play-
wright, who wrote for the stage, and who was on
his beam ends for want of money. This playwright
put Cook's journals together in literary form (and
not badly, it must be admitted), and disposed of
them to a publisher for £6,000 ! Of this amount
neither Cook nor his wife — afterwards his widow —
received one penny.

But the revelation of Australia (as the island-
continent was afterwards called — New South Wales
was the name given to it by Cook) was so remarkable,
together with the virtual discovery of New Zealand,
that it was decided to despatch Cook with another
expedition to search for a supposed Antarctic conti-

43 7

A Gallery of Heroes and Heroines

nent, and he was sent out in June, 1772, in command
of two vessels, the Resolution and the Adventure.
Owing to stupid meanness on the part of the British
Admiralty, Sir Joseph Banks, who had organised a
splendid scientific expedition staff, was refused the
necessary accommodation on board the ships, and
did not go ; consequently, on Cook's second journey
he was unable to contribute as much to the world's
knowledge as he might have done had Sir Joseph
Banks been his partner in the enterprise. Yet Cook,
like all heroes, being much in advance of his age,
did his best to make the expedition a success. He
determined that there should be no devastating
scurvy amongst his seamen ; for hitherto, during all
the great voyages of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and
early eighteenth century, the ravages of scurvy
amongst officers and crew had lamed many an
attempt at maritime discovery — had, indeed, brought
several expeditions to utter ruin.

Cook's second expedition, which, amongst other
things, was to attempt to reach the South Pole,
called first of all at the Cape of Good Hope, and
then sailed straight for the Antarctic region, getting
amongst icebergs over which the terrific waves of the
Southern Ocean broke even when they were sixty
feet high. Yet this occurred when the Resolution
and Adventure had scarcely got farther south than
the forty-fifth degree of south latitude. His vessels,
however, dodged the icebergs, and crept on and on
till they reached the southern latitude of sixty-four
degrees, encountering, however, no islands such as

44

Captain James Cook

were then thought to dot the surface of the ocean
at intervals between South Africa and Antarctica.
They guessed of the existence, however, of islets
here and there from the abundance of sea-birds
of a kind which never travelled far out from land.
Turning their course to the eastward, Cook's ships
sailed round the southern Indian Ocean till they
reached the South Island of New Zealand, having
been one hundred and seventeen days at sea and
sailed ten thousand nine hundred and eighty miles
without once seeing land. Their joy, therefore, in
landing at Dusky Bay was almost uncontrollable,
especially as one of the ship's officers killed a large
seal, and thus provided a small portion of fresh meat
for the crews. Soon after they landed, moreover,
they found that the country teemed with ducks and
flightless rails, some of which were so very tame or
foolish as to stand still and stare at the sailors till
they were knocked down with a stick. Meantime
Cook's other ship, the Adventure, which had been
separated from the Resolution by baffling winds in
the Indian Ocean, had made her way to Tasmania,
but, as already arranged, finally rejoined her sister-
ship in Queen Charlotte Sound, between the two
great islands of New Zealand. The two ships then
made their way to Tahiti, rediscovered the Tonga
archipelago, already visited by Tasman, and once
more came back to New Zealand. From New
Zealand Cook made another attempt to find the
Antarctic Continent, and penetrated as far south as
seventy-two degrees, where he was held up by the

45

A Gallery of Heroes and Heroines

huge ice-barrier — " vast mountains of ice." He had
probably reached the coast of Wilkes's Land.

Being now satisfied that Antarctica was more or
less unattainable with the means at his command,
he once more sailed north to warmer regions, and
in this way rediscovered Easter Island, that had
already been visited by Spaniards and Dutch,
though not placed in an accurate way on any map.
This small island till then was thought to be
another northern projection of the Antarctic Conti-
nent. Next he visited the Marquesas Archipelago,
and placed it accurately on the map, and from there
made his way to the New Hebrides, where he per-
formed the same services for geography. This was
followed by the discovery of the large island of New
Caledonia. Once more the Resolution (the Adven-
ture having through shortage of supplies returned
to England) made her way to New Zealand, to find,
however, that the attitude of the natives in Queen
Charlotte Sound had changed. They had killed and
eaten a boat's crew of the Adventure, and therefore
thought Cook must have returned to punish them
as they deserved. Not being sure, however, who
were the culprits, he did nothing of the kind, but
now made his way once more across the Pacific to
the extremity of South America. He visited and
surveyed the Falkland Islands, which soon after-
wards became a British possession, and then he
discovered the large island of South Georgia. From
here he skirted this section of the Antarctic Ocean
until he reached the Cape of Good Hope. He had

46

Captain James Cook

thus examined more or less attentively the whole of
the Antarctic waters of the globe, and had proved
definitely that there was no such thing as an Ant-
arctic Continent projecting beyond Polar regions or
easily attainable by the ships of his day.

After his return to England in 1775 he was made
a post-captain and given an appointment which
brought in the miserable salary of £200 a year.
But the Admiralty very soon decided to resume the
British exploration of the Pacific Ocean, and in 1776
Cook was again appointed to command the Resolu-
tion, to which was added a smaller consort, the
Discovery. The principal voyage of this expedition
was quite the opposite of the second. It was to
explore the north-west Pacific coast of America, and
find out if there was any sea-passage free from
blocking ice between Asia and America and between
the Pacific and Atlantic. Cook's route lay round
the Cape of Good Hope across the Southern Indian
Ocean (where he discovered such of the island
groups as had not been already revealed by French
explorers), past Tasmania to New Zealand and
Tahiti. Sailing northwards from Tahiti, he re-
vealed in January, 1778, a new Pacific land, the
archipelago of Hawaii. He then continued his
journey to the coast of what is now British
Columbia. He explored that and the confines of
the great peninsula of Alaska, passed through
Behring's Straits, and entered the Arctic Ocean,
suggesting, if not proving, that North America had
no land connection with any North Polar continent,

47

A Gallery of Heroes and Heroines

if there were such. Returning south again to
relieve the sufferings of his frost-bitten crews, Cook
decided to make another stay at the Sandwich
Islands (as he called what we now know as Hawaii).
Here, in an utterly unforeseen manner, he met his
death in a miserable skirmish on the island of
Hawaii on February 12, 1779. A party of the crew
of the Resolution had landed to get fresh water.
They became involved in some quarrels with sus-
picious natives, and Cook, in going to their rescue,
was killed.

James Cook remains the most remarkable figure
in the past history of Australasia. As regards the
magnitude of his discoveries, he was the greatest of
British navigators, for he not only solved nearly all
the mysteries of the Pacific Ocean, and definitely
placed on the map all its islands and archipelagoes
excepting Fiji, but he did so with singularly little
hardship to his crews, whose health he studied with
the utmost care. In his contact with the natives he
left behind him an admirable reputation for kindli-
ness and sympathy. Though entirely self-educated,
he was a man of remarkable shrewdness in his
observations and accuracy in his descriptions. The
books composed from his journals read like those of
modern travellers. No doubt such results were
largely due to the influence of the equally remark-
able Sir Joseph Banks ; yet Banks, of course, had
nothing to do with Cook's supreme skill as a ship
navigator and an astronomical observer. Cook
stands in the first rank of the world's heroes. It is

48

Captain James Cook

therefore interesting to remember that he rose from
being the son of a Yorkshire farm-labourer and a
boy serving out groceries in a village shop to be-
coming the commander of ships which performed
voyages far more wonderful than those of Columbus,
and which revealed to the knowledge of science the
coasts of the Arctic and Antarctic Oceans, the Con-
tinent of Australia, the Dominion of New Zealand,
and most of the islands and archipelagoes of the
Pacific Ocean.

49

NELSON OF THE NILE

AT the parsonage of the little
village of Burnham Thorpe in
Norfolk was born on Michaelmas
Day, 1758, Horatio Nelson, the fifth
son of the Rev. Edmund Nelson,
Rector of Hillborough and of Burn-
ham Thorpe. His father came of
an ancient family settled in Nor-
folk from the sixteenth century, but descended
farther back from a Lancashire or Northumbrian
stock very probably of Danish origin, as the name in
a slightly different form is most common in Scandi-
navia. The name Horatio had been given to the
second son of the Rev. Edmund Nelson (who had in
all a family of eight sons and three daughters), but
the first Horatio Nelson only lived a few months,
and the name was repeated when the Rector's fifth
child was born. The great Horatio Nelson had, in
all, seven brothers, yet each of these either died
young or left no children to succeed him. Lord
Nelson himself had no legitimate issue, and the
present Earl Nelson is the descendant of the great
Admiral's sister Susanna, who married a Mr. Bolton.
Nelson's daughter Horatia, whose mother was Lady
Hamilton, lived to a great age, and died as recently
as 1881, but apparently without leaving any children

50

Nelson of the Nile

to be actual descendants of the greatest sea warrior
in the history of Great Britain.

Horatio Nelson, when he grew up, was not an
imposing figure of a man, but was of slight, delicate
frame and a stature scarcely reaching to middle
height. But his manner must have been of great
vivacity and charm, giving the impression of tre-
mendous vitality, and able to assume at will a
dignity and courtliness of bearing which left a deep
impression, even though there was in his days of
celebrity the disfigurement of the blind eye * and
the empty sleeve.

Horatio from boyhood was destined for the sea,
because other brothers were going into Government
or merchants' offices or the Church, and his mother's
brother, Captain Maurice Suckling, was an officer
in the Royal Navy, and able to give his nephew a
start in that profession. Accordingly, after a few
years of education at Norfolk schools, Horatio at
the age of only twelve accompanied his uncle on
board the Raisonnable, and thence passed to the
guardship at Chatham. As there seemed to be set-
ting in now a period of peace, Captain Suckling very
wisely decided to send his nephew on a cruise to the
West Indies on board a merchant vessel, a journey
which he must have made at the early age of
thirteen. After his return he was employed on
boats plying between London, Chatham, and the
North Foreland, so that he rapidly acquired in-

* Nelson's right eye was destroyed by a spurt of sharp pebbles thrown up
by a cannon-shot outside the fortifications of Calvi, Corsica, in July, 1794.

51 8

A Gallery of Heroes and Heroines

valuable knowledge as a river pilot, though only a
little lad of fourteen. In 1772, at an age when most
boys of his class in life are contemplating their first
transference to a public school, Nelson went as a
midshipman on a sailing-ship of the unpleasant
name of Carcass, which was to explore the Arctic
seas north of Canada. In 1773 he went out to the
East Indies on board the Seahorse, and there made
the acquaintance of another midshipman or appren-
tice, Thomas Trowbridge, afterwards to become one
of his greatest officers. But his health — never very
good — broke down completely in the most unhealthy
conditions which then characterised ship-life in the
tropics. He was so ill off the coast of India that he
was sent home by the long and wearisome voyage
round the Cape of Good Hope. In the course of this
voyage he was seized by such a fit of depression that
he felt at times impelled to throw himself overboard.
But suddenly there came a change of mind, "a
sudden glow of patriotism," and the resolve to live,
and if need be die, for his King and his country. He
determined that he would be a hero, and brave every
danger in order to leave behind him a great reputa-
tion. A few years passed tranquilly on cruises in
home waters and in studying for his profession
enabled him to pass an examination as a navigating
lieutenant. Two years afterwards, at the very early
age of twenty, he was made a post-captain ! The
following year, 1780, saw him taking part in a
remarkable expedition to the southern part of
Nicaragua. Great Britain was once more at war

52

Nelson of the Nile

with Spain, and in order to punish that Power for
attacks on British possessions elsewhere it was
determined to send an expedition to invade Central
America. Already the idea was in the air of the
strategical importance of the narrowest parts of the
long isthmus which connects North with South
America. It was realised that the lake of Nicaragua
and the river which carried its waters into the
Atlantic might be a natural water route nearly all
the way across Central America from Atlantic to
Pacific, one which might well be worth seizure by
Great Britain. Nelson especially was enthusiastic
over this idea, but the terribly unhealthy climate
proved a more deadly foe than the Spaniards, and
the expedition was withdrawn. Nelson then went
on to Canada, and in that bracing climate gained a
measure of health which dissipated much of the
perpetual illness of his youth, and gave him the
necessary physical vigour for the accomplishment
of his amazing career. After the conclusion of peace
in 1783 he visited France, so as to get a better idea of
the people he had already encountered in sea war-
fare, and whom he disliked in a way which we
should now consider unreasonable and unfair. Yet
on this tour he fell in love with a Frenchwoman,
and would have married her if she had accepted his
proposals.

Between 1785 and 1790 he spent five years as the
commander of a frigate in the West Indies, and
here met his wife. It was curious that, after
having formed at an early age romantic attach-

53

A Gallery of Heroes and Heroines

ments either in Canada or France for young and
beautiful girls, he should have sought to marry a
widow woman some years older than himself. She
had been the wife of a doctor on the island of Nevis,
and Nelson began by taking a great fancy to her
little son, with whom he would romp and play,
laying aside all his dignity as a post-captain. His
wife brought him little or nothing in the way of
property, but for some years the marriage proved a
happy one, though, as he was passionately fond of
children, his having no family was a great dis-
appointment.

The outbreak of war with revolutionary France
at the end of 1793 gave him opportunities of distinc-
tion in the British Channel and the Mediterranean,
and though he lost the use of one eye in Corsica
(1794), he played a great part in the Battle of St. Vin-
cent, for which last services he was made a Rear-
Admiral and a Knight of the Bath. A few months
afterwards (July, 1797) he attempted to intercept the
Spanish treasure-ships from the Philippines when
they called at the Canary Islands. But the force at
his disposal, and the capture of the town of Teneriffe
(with its very insecure and stormy anchorage), were
quite inadequate. Nelson's landing - party was
driven off with considerable loss, and he himself
was shot through the right arm, which had to be
amputated at the elbow. Some months of terrible
pain and exhaustion were now passed in England ;
but he was keen to return to active service, and the
Government of his day was equally anxious to

54

Nelson of the Nile

make use of his talents. Accordingly he returned
to the Mediterranean in the spring of 1798, specially
instructed to watch and intercept the great French
fleet which was preparing for some mysterious pur-
pose at Toulon. A terrific gale, however, so damaged
his own ship and others of his squadron that he was
obliged to retire for repairs to the coast of Sardinia.
During his absence from the vicinity of Toulon
the French fleet sailed with Napoleon Bonaparte
and forty thousand soldiers on board, bent on the
daring purpose of conquering and occupying Egypt,
and from that region striking at the British Empire
in India. Nelson, after his repairs were effected,
sailed for Toulon, found his enemy had escaped
him, and could obtain absolutely no information as
to their destination. He sailed up and down the
western coasts of Italy ; then, with the first glimmer
of suspicion, to Alexandria in Egypt, where he found
no trace of the French ; once more back to Sicily ;
and then again, through another clue, to Alexandria.
Here, of course, he learnt that the French Army had
been landed a fortnight earlier, and that Napoleon,
in the Battle of the Pyramids, had already made
himself master of Lower Egypt. But the fleet of
ships which had brought him, and which was abso-
lutely necessary to keeping up his communications
with France, instead of at once placing themselves
in a position of safety to await events, had anchored
itself in the Bay of Abukir, between Alexandria and
the Rashid or Rosetta mouth of the Nile. On the
very evening of the day on which he had arrived off

55

A Gallery of Heroes and Heroines

Alexandria (August i, 1798) Nelson espied the thir-
teen great seventy-four-gun men-of-war of the
French fleet anchored in a long curve in Abukir
Bay. Rapidly he took in the situation. There was
just room, without too much danger of grounding,
for five of the British ships (fourteen in all) to pass
between the French vessels and the shore ; on which
shore nearly a third of the French sailors were
engaged in filling water- casks, or on other employ-
ment away from their vessels. Eight more of the
British ships were to attack the French thirteen
from the direction of the open sea, thus taking the
French men-of-war between two fires. So terribly
effective and so adroit was this attack (so admirably
managed also) that little or no loss of life was caused
to the British by the cross-fire of their own ships.
Between seven in the evening and midnight the
French fleet was virtually destroyed, only two of
its vessels escaping destruction and sailing away in
the early hours of the next morning to tell the
terrible tale of the Battle of the Nile — a battle in
which the French Admiral lost his life and Nelson
received a shot-wound in the head. The results of
this action (for which Nelson was made a peer
under the title of Baron Nelson of the Nile) were to
make the eventual French evacuation of Egypt a
certainty, and prevent their contemplated attack on
the British Empire in India. It was the first smash-
ing blow dealt at Napoleon's schemes, and conse-
quently Nelson became a hero of world - wide
renown. With part of his fleet he proceeded to

56

Nelson of the Nile

Naples, and here was received in the most flattering
manner by the King and Queen of that country and
by Sir William and Lady Hamilton, the British
Minister and his wife. Nelson fell in love with the
beautiful Lady Hamilton, and was by her led to
misuse his power and position for the furtherance
of the Queen of Naples' schemes. He assisted the
Royalist forces to put down insurrections which
were really justified by the shocking misgovern-
ment of the country, and the desire on the part of
right-thinking people that Naples should, like the
rest of Italy, advance towards conditions of civilised
government. Nelson had been made Duke of
Bronte — a magnificent property in Sicily — and he
lent himself in the basest way to breaches of agree-
ment and capitulations and the judicial slaughter
of Neapolitan republicans who had surrendered on
terms. He even went farther in this respect than
the Neapolitan commanders themselves.

In 1800, disgusted at not being made Commander-
in-Chief of the Mediterranean, he obtained leave of
absence, and returned overland to England with his
friends the Hamiltons, with whom he afterwards
took up his abode, deserting and becoming separ-
ated from his own wife. Nevertheless, as a naval
commander he was indispensable to the British
Admiralty, and probably in that period of our his-
tory no naval officer could have saved England from
disaster but Lord Nelson, whose tremendous public
services must be held to outweigh his private faults
of disposition caused by his infatuation for a beauti-

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A Gallery of Heroes and Heroines

ful but unworthy woman. Nelson was sent in
1801, under the nominal command of Sir Hyde
Parker, to secure the command of the Baltic Sea
for the British Fleet, if necessary at the expense of
Denmark. In spite of Sir Hyde Parker's signal of
recall, he carried out his own plan of action, and
won the Battle of Copenhagen, capturing or destroy-
ing the Danish Fleet, which might have been used
against us by the French. After two years' rest,
which he spent mainly at Merton, near Wimbledon,
Nelson was madeCommander-in-Chief in the Medi-
terranean in the summer of 1803. On the resump-
tion of war between England and France in that
year Napoleon was resolved to prepare a fleet of
overwhelming strength which, after misleading the
divided British Fleet, should assemble in the
Channel for a few hours of undoubted supremacy
and enable Napoleon to land on our shores with an
army sufficiently numerous to conquer London and
humble the British Government in the dust.

By the extraordinary activity of Nelson and
other British naval commanders the various divi-
sions of the French Fleet were followed backwards
and forwards across the Atlantic, and constantly
headed off from the British Channel, so that at last,
joined by their Spanish allies, they assembled
thirty-four powerful vessels in the harbour of Cadiz
to await further developments in the autumn of
1805. Napoleon, infuriated at having perpetually to
postpone his plans for the invasion of England, and
believing rightly that his Commander - in - Chief

58

Nelson of the Nile

(Admiral Villeneuve) was timid and irresolute,
despatched another Admiral to supersede him, and
at the same time ordered him to proceed with his
whole fleet through the Straits of Gibraltar, fight a
decisive action with the British, and reinforce the
French in Southern Italy. Villeneuve did not wait
for the arrival of his successor, but left Cadiz with
thirty-three ships on October 20, 1805, sailing east-
wards in five divisions. Nelson, who had arrived
on the scene not long before, after a visit to England,
at once attacked the Franco-Spanish fleet, instruct-
ing his officers that no time must be wasted in form-
ing a precise line of battle. Off Cape Trafalgar the
action took place, just as the unhappy Villeneuve
was deciding to return to the fortified harbour of
Cadiz. The battle began in the middle of the day,
and was over by five o'clock in the afternoon.
Eighteen of the enemy's ships were taken during
the battle and four were captured subsequently.
Eleven ships succeeded in reaching Cadiz, to be
surrendered three years afterwards to the Spaniards.
The other vessels under Villeneuve's command
were sunk and destroyed.

Early in the action Nelson himself was shot by
one of the French riflemen firing from a ship turret.
The bullet entered his chest and penetrated to the
spine, which it shattered. This terrible wound,
though it made death certain, at the same time
made the hero less sensible to pain. He lay for
some hours in the cockpit of his ship in a perfect
inferno of horror — absolute darkness, only relieved

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A Gallery of Heroes and Heroines

here and there by dim lanterns, the whole vessel
shuddering at brief intervals with the discharge of
her heavy guns, or struck here and there by the
enemy's cannon-balls, a hundred or so wounded
and dying seamen and marines, yelling, raving,
groaning with their agonies as the surgeons passed
to and fro amongst them. [It was long before the
days of anaesthetics, and, except a little opium,
nothing could be done to diminish these awful
sufferings.] But Nelson lived long enough to retain
command of operations and to learn that the victory
was complete. Then, asking his colleague, Hardy,
to give him a kiss of farewell, he died, knowing that
the result of his victory would be to relieve his
beloved country of any danger of foreign invasion
for a long while to come.

It is truly related that, on going into battle, his
signal to the fleet was, " England expects every man
to do his duty." Nelson throughout his life had
done his duty as he conceived it, had never spared
health, had never hesitated to risk life in doing so.

60

ARTHUR WELLESLEY, FIRST DUKE OF

WELLINGTON

ARTHUR WELLESLEY was
born either in Dublin or at Dan-
gan Castle, in the Irish county of
Meath, on or about May i, 1769.
Both the place and the actual
day of his birth remain uncertain
owing to the carelessness with
which such events were recorded
at that period of our history, especially in Ireland.
Yet he was born " The Honble. Arthur Wesley," the
son of an Earl, because his father, nine years before
his birth, had become Earl of Mornington in the
peerage of Ireland.

The grandfather of the future Duke of Welling-
ton was Richard Colley, or Cowley, the nephew by
marriage and adopted son of Gerald or " Garret '
Wesley, a landowner on a considerable scale in the
counties of Meath and Kildare. Garret Wesley-
like his kinsman, the great Dr. John Wesley, founder
of the Wesleyan Church — was descended from the
ancient Somersetshire family of Wellesley, which
originated at the village of Welswe, near Wells, and
a branch of which migrated in the thirteenth cen-
tury to Ireland. But although the second Earl of
Mornington (Marquis Wellesley) and his younger

61

A Gallery of Heroes and Heroines

brother, the Duke of Wellington, both chose little
Somersetshire towns or villages for their territorial
titles, it is very doubtful whether they had any
Wesley or Wellesley blood in their veins. Their
father's father was a Colley, son of the brother of
Garret Wesley's wife. The Colleys were, like the
Wellesleys, of remote English descent, having
sprung from Rutlandshire. They had been among
the earliest of English families to settle in Ireland,
and as they mainly intermarried with Irish women
in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth cen-
turies, the Duke of Wellington, their descendant,
must be considered an Irishman.

Richard Colley- Wesley, who adopted the sur-
name of Wesley on succeeding to the estates of his
uncle-in-law, Garret Wesley, was raised to the Irish
peerage in 1747 as Baron Mornington, a rank in-
creased to that of an earldom in the case of his son
Garret. The first Earl became the father of several
notable men : William, afterwards Marquis Welles-
ley, and a great Governor-General of India ; Arthur,
Duke of Wellington; and Henry Wellesley (Lord
Cowley), a skilful ambassador.

Arthur was the fourth son of an improvident and
dreamy man, devoted to the study of music, and
careless in his expenditure. When Lord Morning-
ton died in 1781 his estates in Ireland were heavily
encumbered with debt, and he left a widow and a
family of five sons and one daughter insufficiently
provided for. Arthur was at that time about twelve

years old, and it was decided by his eldest brother

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Arthur Wellesley

that he should go into the Army. He was therefore
taken away from a Church of England school at
Trim, and accompanied his mother (who found him
" stupid, dull, and of slow, thick speech ") to London.
Here he attended for a few months a preparatory
school in Chelsea, from which he was transferred to
Eton in 1782. But Eton fees and charges proved too
expensive for his mother, who took him away to
reside at Brussels with her for about twelve months
in 1784-85. At the age of fifteen Arthur Wesley
evinced a great love of music, inherited from his
father, and was able to play tolerably well on the
violin, a recreation which he kept up till he was a
Colonel in India, when he dropped riddling " as a
performance undignified in a commanding officer
of rank." During his twelve months in Brussels
he pursued his studies in French and in subjects
suited to an army career. Quite possibly he may
have ridden or walked many times over the future
field of Waterloo without any premonition that it
was here he was to achieve, thirty-five years after-
wards, that huge success which would rank him
amongst the greatest army commanders the world
has ever known. When his mother returned to
England in 1785, Arthur Wesley (he did not sign
himself " Wellesley " till some years later) was sent
to complete his education at a French " academy '
conducted by an engineer officer at Angers in the
west of France.

In this capital of the great province of Anjou,
whence came our long dynasty of Plantagenet

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Kings, the future Duke of Wellington acquired that
considerable knowledge of the French language
which in after-years helped him so much as nego-
tiator and administrator in the Spanish peninsula,
in France, Belgium, and Austria. He also learnt at
this quasi-military school a good deal of the same
military science which made his rival, Napoleon
Bonaparte, the master for some years of Western
and Central Europe. [It is curious to think that
these two marvellous men, who shaped the history
of the world of the nineteenth century, were born
within a few months of one another in 1769, and
were both studying the art of war in France at
the same time, the one at Angers and the other at
Brienne.]

Arthur Wellesley, on his return to England in
1787, found that, through the influence of his eldest
brother, Lord Mornington, he had been gazetted as
an ensign into the 73rd Regiment. His transfers
and promotions in the army between infantry and
cavalry succeeded one another rapidly, and were
not, perhaps, entirely connected with special merit.
In the middle of his military career he got himself
returned in 1793 to the Irish Parliament as a
member for Trim, a borough that virtually belonged
to his brother. He was then ruddy-faced and of
somewhat pleasing appearance, his nose not having
acquired that great bony projection which made it
too prominent a feature in his face in after-years for
anyone to describe him as handsome. At this
period he fell in love with Catherine Pakenham, the

64

Arthur Wellesley

third daughter of Lord Longford, and plighted his
troth to this pretty Irish girl. The match seemed a
suitable one on both sides, but both were poor, and
any idea of marriage was put aside indefinitely
until Wellesley should have made a career which
carried with it a suitable income. Meantime he
took an active part in the debates of the Irish
Parliament, but not by any means on the side of
liberty ; he showed himself, in fact, a rather bitter
Conservative and opponent of reform. His attempts
to live in Dublin, not only as a Member of Parlia-
ment, but as an aide-de-camp of the Viceroy, soon
got him into debt, for he had but little money from
his father's estate and small pay as an officer or
official. At this period he was lodging in the house
of a wealthy bootmaker, who, noticing his dejection
and embarrassment on account of his debts, ad-
vanced him a sum of money which paid them off
completely. Wellington never forgot this obliga-
tion. He not only paid off the loan in a few years
by henceforth living with the utmost economy, but
he took every opportunity of showing his regard and
esteem for his helper-out-of-difficulties, and even for
the children of the kindly bootmaker, a family
which, through the Duke of Wellington's efforts,
attained such distinctions in other fields that prob-
ably their descendants are completely unaware that
their family fortunes started from the sale of boots
in Dublin.

Owing to his elder brother's influence, and not,
apparently, to any display of his personal abilities,

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Arthur Wellesley had become a Lieutenant-Colonel
in 1793, after only six years' service in the army,
But soon after this promotion he joined the army
under the Duke of York in the Low Countries — an
army which was intended to co-operate with the
Prussians and Austrians to punish France for the
execution of her King. Military operations were, it
is true, hampered by most adverse weather — con-
stant rain in the summer and autumn and a hard
frost in the winter, which permitted the French to
move enormous forces into the country over the
frozen canals. The people of Belgium, moreover,
had no great desire to be delivered from French
domination, while the British soldiers lost all their
enthusiasm for this campaign when they realised
that they were not fighting under a General worthy
of the title, the Duke of York having shown his
complete lack of military genius. The long succes-
sion of hardships, repulses, and retreats taught
Arthur Wellesley the art of warfare, especially in
the important direction of transport and food-
supply; in short, he received in this otherwise
disastrous campaign a further insight into the
geography of Belgium and its qualities as a battle-
field against the French which went far to shape
his tremendous victory over Napoleon twenty years
afterwards. In 1796, being by this time a Colonel in
the army, and having seemingly quite forgotten his
love-affair with Lord Longford's daughter, he went
out with his regiment, the 33rd, to play an impor-
tant part in the conquest of Southern India. It

66

Arthur Wellesley

was, however, touch-and-go as to whether his dis-
tinguished military career should open in Tropical
Asia or Tropical America, for the ministry of the
day were much inclined to send Wellesley and the
33rd Regiment to the West Indies for the similar
purpose of attacking the French in that direction ;
and even after he had reached India in 1797 he was
on the point of being sent farther on to assist in
the conquest of the Philippine Islands from Spain,
when a despatch sent overland from India (a
desperate venture in those days) informed the
Government of the day that the British position in
India was seriously affected by French intrigues.
An Afghan soldier-adventurer from Northern India
had usurped the control of the great southern
Indian State of Maisur (Mysore). His son, Tipu
Sahib, had succeeded him, and had hoped, with the
aid of the French, to drive the British out of India.
Arthur Wellesley had become filled with a sense
of the importance of the Indian question and the
chance there was of creating a great British Empire
in Southern Asia. He strongly advised his elder
brother, Lord Mornington, to apply for the post of
Governor-General under the East India Company.
He did so, and two years after his arrival at Cal-
cutta made his brother Arthur Commander-in-Chief
in Maisur. This appointment, which might have
been characterised as jobbery, had been fully
merited by the remarkable ability shown by Arthur
Wellesley in preparing the way for a successful
campaign against Tipu Sahib, and in the military

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operations he conducted in command of a portion
of the British force and the contingent of a friendly
Prince, the Nizam of Haiderabad. Wellesley paci-
fied Southern India in a year. His work was then
interrupted by his appointment to the command of
a body of troops which was to occupy either Ceylon,
Java, or Mauritius. Their destination, however,
was changed to Egypt, where they were to take
part in an attack on the French position (the French
had occupied Egypt two years previously with the
intention of operating from that direction against
the British in India). Wellesley, though he would
have much preferred to remain in India, made the
necessary preparations at Bombay for the Egyptian
expedition. Being laid low, however, by a severe
illness, he sent off his troops and remained behind
in hospital. The troopship that would have re-
ceived him on board foundered in the Indian Ocean
near the coast of Arabia, and went to the bottom
with all on board.

Wellesley was then sent back to Maisur. In
1803 he conquered the powerful Mahratta people,
whose power had been the greatest in India after
the downfall of the Mogul Empire. At the age of
thirty-five years he had made a great name, not only
as an invincible General in Indian warfare, but
as a diplomatist of singular tact and ability, who
inspired confidence and friendship amongst Indian
chieftains. He was made a Knight of the Bath in
recognition of his services ; but India being pacified,
he felt that his proper place was in Europe. He

68

Arthur Wellesley

therefore returned to England in 1805, took part in
an abortive expedition to the coast of Hanover, and
in 1806 was elected M.P. for Rye. He entered
Parliament with the intention of defending there
the Indian administration of his brother. His
abilities marked him out for office, and he was
appointed Secretary for Ireland.

Going to Cheltenham for rest and a health cure,
he there met a lady who reminded him that " Kitty
Pakenham," to whom he had been secretly engaged
in 1793, was still faithful to him. Wellesley, who
had apparently forgotten all about her, at once pro-
fessed himself ready to honour his plighted troth.
He wrote at once (early in 1806) proposing marriage.
Miss Pakenham advised him to see first for himself
whether twelve years' interval had not lessened her
attractiveness ; but Wellesley waived this deprecia-
tion of herself, came over to Dublin, and married
the Hon. Catherine Pakenham in April, 1806. By
her he had two sons, born respectively in 1807 and
1808. But his home career was not likely to be long
when this unremitting struggle with France on the
Continent made a constant demand on the British
Government for military officers able to lead troops
to victory against the French and their allies. In
1807 Wellesley took part in an expedition against
Copenhagen, and defeated the Danish forces at
Kjoge. His great chance, however, came in 1808,
when he was made a Lieutenant-General and ap-
pointed to command a division of the British forces
which were to rescue Spain and Portugal from the

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A Gallery of Heroes and Heroines

grip of Napoleon. Wellesley, being allowed to
choose between making Northern Spain or Portugal
his base, decided for the latter country. He landed
on the coast of Portugal in the summer of 1808, and
defeated the French in the Battle of Vimiera. But
the home authorities proceeded to mismanage
matters. Sir Arthur Wellesley was superseded by
two other officers, who came to terms with the
French, and allowed them to leave Portugal with
their army and supplies intact. Wellesley returned
to England and resumed his work in Parliament.
Then followed disasters to the British in the Penin-
sula, and he was sent back there in chief command
of the troops. He landed in the North of Portugal,
and by a series of operations exhibiting remarkable
strategy and address, drove the French out of
Portugal, and pursued them across Spain to the
vicinity of Madrid. This advance could not be
sustained owing to the poor co-operation of the
Spaniards. Wellesley, therefore, with a judgment
remarkable for its prophetic accuracy, not only
retreated to Portugal, but retreated to a region of
the Portuguese coast which was absolutely in-
vincible to an enemy attacking from the land side
(and Great Britain had command of the sea). These
were the lines of Torres Vedras, from which the
French recoiled defeated and disheartened, and from
which as an impregnable base the British Army
advanced into Spain and inflicted a signal defeat on
the French at Talavera (July 28, 1809). This victory,
though it had to be followed by a retreat to the

70

Arthur Wellesley

Portuguese frontier, earned for Wellesley a peerage
as " Baron Douro of Wellesley ' and " Viscount
Wellington of Talavera."

Between the spring of 1811 and the spring of 1813
Wellington (made an Earl in 1812 and a Marquis
and Field- Marshal in 1813) alternately advanced
into Spain, secured brilliant victories over the
French armies, and then retreated to Portugal when
prudence dictated such a measure. These alterna-
tions of advance and retreat naturally caused per-
plexity and change of public opinion at home, and
discontent in the rather turbulent army commanded
by Wellington. Yet the native Governments of
Spain and Portugal and the ministers of the British
Crown fully realised the magnitude of Wellington's
services after each fresh victory, when he received
steps in the British peerage or grants from the
public funds, together with splendid titles and
admittance to the highest orders of chivalry from
Spain and Portugal. In May, 1813, the disasters
which had occurred in Russia to the French Army
gave Wellington his opportunity. Assembling his
force of British, Portuguese, and Spanish soldiers,
he swept the French out of Spain into the defiles of
the Pyrenees. Early in 1814 he had captured their
positions in these mountains and forced them back
on to French soil, where he finally defeated Marshal
Soult at Toulouse. His victorious army reached
Bordeaux in March, 1814, and there Wellington took
leave of his men and returned to England for a brief
rest. In April, 1814, he was received in England

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with extraordinary honours by both Houses of
Parliament, and was created Duke of Wellington.
On making his first appearance in the House of
Lords to take his oath as peer (having been con-
stantly engaged in warfare since the grant of a
Viscounty in 1809), he had the unique experience of
nearing all his titles recited on his introduction to
the House, from that of a barony to that of a duke-
dom. He also received a grant from the public
funds of £400,000, which, together with the £100,000
awarded him after the Battle of Talavera, made
half a million sterling the endowment of his
dukedom.

In June, 1814, he proceeded to Paris as British
Ambassador. In February, 1815, he went on to
Vienna as one of the British delegates at the Con-
gress which was resettling Europe. Soon after his
departure Napoleon landed from Elba, and became
once again Emperor of the French. No other man
than Wellington could be thought of to command
the allied British, Dutch, and Belgian forces at this
juncture for the invasion of France from the north,
which was part of the European scheme for the
reduction of the outlawed Emperor. Napoleon
advanced to the attack with all that remained of the
once brilliant French Army. Wellington wisely
awaited him on a chosen battle-ground a few miles
west of Brussels. Napoleon spent his whole
strength in vain in attacking Wellington's position.
The arrival of the Prussian allies and of Marshal

Bliicher enabled Wellington to deal a blow at the

72

Arthur Wellesley

French Army which crushed it in a few hours'
righting. Napoleon fled to Paris and thence to the
British ships lying off the West Coast of France,
and ended his days as an exile on the island of
St. Helena. Wellington then, as British Commis-
sioner, virtually restored the Bourbon dynasty to
power. Nelson had crushed the French Navy in
the early days of Napoleon's Empire; Wellington,
by his six years' warfare in the Spanish peninsula
and his brilliant generalship at Waterloo, defeated
Napoleon and his Generals on land, and brought
the Napoleonic Empire to a temporary close — an
Empire which, but for his intervention in the
struggle, might have prevailed, at any rate for a
time, and have brought under one rule all Western
and Central Europe, from Hamburg, Dresden, and
Rome to Madrid and Lisbon.

He probably took a narrow view himself of his
purpose in life. He was by no means a disliker of
the French, but he was resolved that his own
country should be the dominant power in India,
and that the balance of power in Europe should be
maintained by a nice adjustment of nationalities.
Perhaps — though he would not have cared two
straws had you told him so in his lifetime — he was
serving the cause of humanity in general in attack-
ing this preponderance of France. Great as the
French genius has been in its enlightenment of
humanity and its additions to the stock of great
ideas on which our civilisation is built up, it might
not have been as well for the future of Europe that

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the western half of that continent should be under
the domination of Paris, any more than it would be
now if from Berlin, London, Vienna, or Rome, all
the great commands were issued.

In disposition the Duke of Wellington was cold
and unlovable. He was a splendid General, and for
the age in which he lived singularly mindful of the
physical welfare of the men under his command,
but his soldiers only respected him for his enormous
abilities, and had no personal affection for him
whatever. It was the same in his own household.
He was not a kind husband or a kind father. He
lived long enough to see himself unpopular in
England as a statesman. When eleven years had
elapsed after his culminating victory at Waterloo
and his settlement of affairs on the Continent, he
became a leading personage in home politics, and
was several times either Prime Minister or the
most notable Minister in the Governments of
George IV. and William IV. ; but in 1831 his dogged
opposition to parliamentary reform enraged a
London mob to the point of smashing the windows
of Apsley House, with the Duke grimly regardant
behind them. Yet he was in reality a statesman,
somewhat of the type of Queen Elizabeth, who
knew when to yield. He counselled George IV. to
admit his Catholic subjects to the full rights of
citizenship, though he himself was as bitterly Pro-
testant as were most of the Anglo-Irish of his day.
He supported Huskisson in the first steps towards
a Free Trade policy, and Sir Robert Peel in abolish-

74

Arthur Wellesley

ing the Corn Laws. He repeatedly advised the
revolutionary Governments of Spain and Portugal,
or the restored monarchies of those countries, to be
tolerant and moderate in their actions ; yet onwards
from the days of his early manhood (as a member
of the Irish Parliament) he denounced or derided
every movement tending towards enlargement of
personal, public, or national liberty. He was suf-
ficiently a great statesman to be no party politician
where his duty lay outside the domain of party
politics. He realised the importance of France in
Europe, and opposed any idea of her dismember-
ment after the defeats of 1814 and 1815 ; but he twice
forced the French to adopt the unwelcome white
flag of the Bourbons instead of the red, white, and
blue of constitutional liberty. He derided all ideas
of Greek independence, and was furious when the
Greeks revolted against the unspeakable tyranny of
the Turks. He would have had Turkey remain strong
and in no way dismembered, without caring in the
least for the misery of millions under her sway.
He would have obliged the Belgians to remain
against their will under the rule of a Dutch King,
though in reality the two people were very dis-
similar from the point of view of religion, history,
and mode of life. Though repellently gruff in
manner, he was often tenderly disposed towards
little children, poor or helpless people ; and though
harsh and unsympathetic towards his own family,
he performed, especially during the last twenty
years of his life, unnumbered, and very often un-

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A Gallery of Heroes and Heroines

recorded, acts of kindness, especially to such as had
been or were serving in that British army which
he had raised to such a striking point of efficiency.
To Wellington the British nation owes, as much as
to Nelson and his captains, the position of predomi-
nance throughout the world which she has enjoyed
for the last hundred years.

76

ELIZABETH FRY

ONE result of the political and
social upheaval of the middle of
the seventeenth century — which
in itself was a direct outcome of
the awakening of England under
Edward VI., Mary, and Elizabeth
-was the establishment of the
Quaker sect. " Quaker," of course,
was only a vuigar nickname of the period; they
were supposed to quake and tremble when inspired
to pray. Their founders — George Fox and his fellow
preachers - - were merely persons of twentieth-
century minds who in the middle and at the close
of the seventeenth century promulgated ideas which
are now held by most persons of advanced thought
and Christian practice. They denounced the iniquity
of negro slavery or any other form of slavery ; they
demanded complete liberty of belief and practice in
religious matters ; they asserted the equality of
women with men; and, amongst other modern
ideas, held that the punishment of criminals by the
law should be shaped so as to put them only under
wise restraint, and to mould them by teaching and
treatment for regaining the places they had forfeited
in human society. In other words, that legal punish-
ments should not be of the nature of revenge —

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A Gallery of Heroes and Heroines

meting out cruelty for cruelty, and torture for
torture, robbery for robbery — but of a nature to
eradicate evil propensities and to heal both mind
and body. They themselves soon came under the
persecutions of the law and of the society of their
day, which was two hundred and fifty years behind
them in its beliefs and morals. But slowly their
leaven worked to our great ultimate advantage; so
that to them and to their closely allied brethren,
the Huguenots of France and the Moravian mis-
sionaries of Germany, we owe some of the most
blessed reforms which affect the lives of black,
white, and yellow people at the present day.

Down to the close of the eighteenth century the
condition of English prisons (Irish and Scotch also,
no doubt) was as horrible as it had been in the
Middle Ages, or was in Morocco down to a few
years ago. But there had arisen in the eighteenth
century another of our national heroes, John
Howard, who spiritually was of the Quaker per-
suasion, though he did not actually belong to that
sect. A man of independent means, and eager to
understand the world, he first devoted himself to
foreign travel and then to the condition of affairs in
his own country. He, too, lived at least a century
in advance of the people of his day. He built model
cottages and founded model schools, but, above all,
he was impressed by the horrible condition of the
English prisons, and bestirred himself effectually to
get some, at least, of their worst horrors abolished.
He was the beginner of prison reform, but his suc-

78

Elizabeth Fry

cessor in this task — a task which was resumed
chiefly by women in the early nineteenth century-
was Elizabeth Fry (born Elizabeth Gurney in 1780).
If John Howard's first care was for the physical
wellbeing of prisoners - - namely, the supply of
housing accommodation in some degree fit for
human beings, of tolerable drinking-water and
tolerable food — the efforts of Elizabeth Fry were
directed additionally to securing for them, and
especially for the women amongst them, decent
mental treatment — healing occupations for their
minds, as well as wholesome accommodation for
their bodies.

The efforts, the life-work of this great man and
this equally great woman, have by degrees changed
the whole of our outlook in regard to the treatment
of those who are confined for offences against the
law and the person, though as yet there are only a
few towns in the most civilised countries in the
world in which the conditions attending imprison-
ment can be considered satisfactory. Even at the
present day it is still believed by many officials that
those who are deprived of their liberty for crimes
and misdemeanours should, in addition to confine-
ment and forced labour, be punished by miserable
conditions of life — vermin in their cells, dreadful
cold in winter, stuffy heat in summer, very little
light, a solitary life (that is to say, refusal of inter-
course with other human beings, save occasional
visits from the chaplain and the governor), dreari-
ness of occupation, nasty food, nasty smells, and

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sleeping accommodation so arranged as to banish
sleep. The prison is still in nine cases out of ten a
torture-chamber, making misdoers worse for their
incarceration rather than better.

Most of these phrases and sentences are actually
taken from the journals and letters of Elizabeth
Fry, published two years after her death, which
occurred in 1845. If we could recapture her spirit,
and get her to talk to us at the present day, we
should find she was just about on a par with the
great-minded women of 1915, so advanced was her
outlook a hundred years ago.

Her father, John Gurney, was a Quaker, as his
ancestors had been before him, right back to the
seventeenth century. He retired from business in
Norwich (where his daughter Elizabeth was born),
and settled down as a country gentleman in Nor-
folk. Elizabeth was remarkable as a girl for her
education, her sweetness of disposition, and her
originality of opinion. When she was twenty years
old she married Joseph Fry, a London merchant,
and in course of time — that is to say, between 1801
and 1822 — was, like many leaders in the woman's
movement of to-day, the mother of a large family.
Being extremely industrious, clear-headed, and full
of a sense of the value of time, she was able to give
attention to all her family requirements and yet
find herself with leisure for the affairs of her less
fortunate neighbours. Marriage did not check her
social or religious work. She was acknowledged
as a minister amongst the Quakers, which would

80

Elizabeth Fry

mean at the present day that she was a good plat-
form speaker, and was honoured as such. In the
early part of 1813 she began to give special attention
to the condition of the women prisoners in Newgate,
and founded an association for their improvement
four years afterwards. Up to that time no attempt
was made to separate the women from the men in
these noisome dungeons, and the result was horrible
beyond my power to describe it. There were no
women warders, and no difference was made be-
tween the poor girl awaiting trial for or convicted
of some trivial little misdemeanour, and the mur-
deress or associate of cut-throat robbers. Elizabeth
Fry, of course, met with much opposition, many
difficulties and obstacles from officialdom, and even
at the hands of her friends and associates in
London. In all probability she was called un-
womanly, and reminded that her proper sphere of
work was her own home. But her husband and
her brother seem to have appreciated her as she
deserved. In the course of the year 1818, accom-
panied by her brother, she visited the prisons of
northern England and of Scotland. Her work
aroused attention amongst members of Parliament
able to turn their thoughts now to home affairs,
since the devastating war on the Continent had
come to a close with Wellington's victory at Water-
loo ; in fact, the great era of the nineteenth-century
reforms had opened. A committee of the House of
Commons was appointed to consider the state of
our prisons, and gave cordial recognition to the

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work done by Mrs. Fry. From this followed in-
quiries and correspondence on the part of philan-
thropists abroad, so that the principles enunciated
by Elizabeth Fry began to make themselves felt
even as far afield as Russia. In 1827 Elizabeth Fry
made a journey through Ireland for the purpose of
reporting on the condition of Irish prisons, asylums,
and hospitals. Under the reforming reign of Louis
Philippe, she was invited to France, and was
officially authorised to visit and report on French
prisons in tours which eventually extended from
the extreme north to the extreme south. For the
same purpose she also travelled through Switzer-
land, Southern Germany, Belgium, Holland, North
Germany, and Denmark. These journeys, however,
with the inevitable illnesses and great fatigue which
they occasioned, brought on a failing condition of
health, and the last three years of her life were
those of an invalid with an active mind, but a
cruelly disabled body. She had the satisfaction,
however, before her death, not only of seeing her
views as to prison discipline and prison accommoda-
tion approved and adopted by the leading civilised
States, but of her desire to reform hospitals and the
whole system of nursing the sick or the demented
taken up by a noble successor, Florence Nightingale,
who might almost be regarded spiritually as her
daughter, certainly as her direct successor in this
display of real Christianity.

82

HAVELOCK OF LAKHNAU

OUR vast, and on the whole our
very beneficent Empire over India
was founded by seamen and mer-
chant adventurers. The Portu-
guese discovered the sea route to
India round the Cape of Good
Hope, and for nearly a hundred
years contrived to keep it to them-
selves. But when Philip II. of Spain seized the
Crown of Portugal, and involved that westernmost
portion of Europe in the hatred which the Spanish
monarchy had inspired in England, Holland, and
France, English and Dutch seamen were actuated
partly by a desire for revenge and partly a lust for
gain, not only in finding their way to all parts of
America, but in ousting the Portuguese from their
exclusive domination over West Africa and attack-
ing them in Southern Asia. We may see in study-
ing the life of Drake what a wonderful change he
gave to the world's history in his daring voyage
with a single small sailing-ship from the coast of
California to the Moluccas, Java, the Cape of Good
Hope, and England. This voyage, with others that
followed closely on it, pricked the bubble of Portu-
guese supremacy in the Indian Ocean. By the
commencement of the seventeenth century both a

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Dutch and an English East India Company had
been formed; and during the seventeenth, eighteenth,
and first half of the nineteenth centuries this asso-
ciation of London merchants for East Indian trade
had grown into an organisation for the government
of the whole of the Indian peninsula from the foot-
hills of the Himalayas to Ceylon and Burma. This
company- -virtually a department of the British
Government after 1833 — maintained its rule over
India by the loan of a few British regiments com-
bined with its own armed sailing-boats or steamers,
and a large army under British officers recruited
from the Muhammadan and Hindu natives of
India. The more it prospered, the more the native
states crumbled in contact with it. They were
worse and worse governed by more and more de-
generate Princes, while in the regions under the
direct sway of the company life and property were
fairly secure. No man who had saved money and
lived lawfully stood in danger of losing his property.
To a great extent, therefore, British rule in India
had become popular, so that some of the districts
that were annexed after victorious campaigns
against native Princes much preferred to transfer
their allegiance to this handful of British adminis-
trators. Yet in the regions of the north and centre
there were dynasties which had inspired affection
in spite of their faults ; also the people were in some
parts fanatical Muhammadans, who preferred to be
badly governed by men of their own religious belief
than to be well-governed by Christians. In their

84

Havelock of Lakhnau

annexations the company (really the British
Government acting through the Viceroy) had in-
spired deep-seated enmity by refusing to recognise
native ideas of succession and by robbing Princes-
or seeming to rob them — of their birthright. Also
amongst the British soldiers and administrators
there were occasionally stupid men who did good
things stupidly and remained obstinately ignorant
of native prejudices and superstitions. The entrance
into India of Christian missionaries in the early
part of the nineteenth century produced two effects :
it spread education and a knowledge of European
ideas, and therefore aroused inquiries and criticism
as to methods of British Government in India ; or it
caused a dread to arise in the minds of fanatical
Muhammadans and Hindus that native religions
would be set on one side, and the whole peninsula
be brought within the Christian fold, whether it
wished to enter that fold or not. So from these and
other causes the spirit of unrest grew up in the native
army employed by the East India Company. The
Indian Mutiny, fomented by Muhammadans and
Hindus, broke out in 1857, and in a month or two
had paralysed the British hold over North-Central
India. But this awful crisis — which might have
resulted in an anarchy costing India herself millions
of lives and hundreds of million pounds worth of
property — found uncountable heroes amongst the
British and the Anglo-Indian (that is to say, half-
caste) population : from Lord Canning and Sir John
Lawrence at Calcutta and Lahore to Sir Henry

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Lawrence in Lakhnau, Sir James Outram at Haider-
abad, Sir Hugh Ross in the Bombay Presidency, and
to that Thomas Henry Kavanagh, who, disguised as
a native, slithered out of the beleaguered Residency
of Lakhnau in order to guide the relieving column
from Kanpur along the best route to its relief; and
to the unnamed young telegraph operator in Delhi,
who, after the blowing-up of the magazine and the
destruction of nearly all the British officers and
residents in that Muhammadan city, continued
telegraphing the news to other cities till he was cut
down and killed by Muhammadan fanatics.

Foremost amongst the heroes who saved the
situation in India at that period — a salvation, it
must be remembered, as necessary to the welfare of
India as to that of the British Empire in general-
was Henry Havelock, who was born near Sunder-
land in 1795, the son of a wealthy shipbuilder living
at Ford Hall, Bishop- Wearmouth. Henry Havelock
was at first trained to become a barrister, but, owing
to his father's dislike to that career, he accepted a
commission as a lieutenant in the Rifle Brigade,
and applied himself forthwith to a serious study of
the military profession. Desiring to see service in
India, whither two of his brothers had gone, he took
the pains to acquire Hindustani under an English
professor of that language. As in the case of
Wellington and of most of the heroes described in
this volume who distinguished themselves as great
soldiers, we find, even though the custom was not a
common one in their day, that their achievements

86

Havelock of Lakhnau

were not based entirely on genius, but quite as much
on a most painstaking study of their profession
whilst they were young. It is doubtful, even at the
present day, if many staff corps officers — still less
officers of the British army — go out to India as well
equipped with a previous knowledge of India, her
peoples and languages, as was the case with Have-
lock in 1823.

He took part in the first war against the King of
Burma, and was one of the three British officers
that carried up the Treaty of Yandabu to the King's
residence at Ava for ratification. The then great
King of Ava was so much impressed with his bear-
ing and manners that he actually bestowed on him
an order of Burmese nobility.

In 1829 Havelock married the daughter of a great
missionary, whose work amongst the people had
impressed him with the good it was doing. He
took part in the ill-judged war with Afghanistan in
1838, and was more or less present in that country
throughout all the events that followed down to the
close of 1842, making himself noteworthy amongst
other feats of arms by a splendid defence of the
fortress of Jalalabad, where he and his little garrison
were besieged for many months by the Afghans.
At last, in despair, he sallied out with the greater
part of his small garrison, and inflicted such a
severe defeat on the Afghans that he virtually
brought the besiegement to a close. Between 1843
and 1845 (having by this time become as adept a
speaker of Persian as he was earlier still of Hindu-

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stani, and possibly Burmese), he passed through the
last campaign against the Mahrattas and the tre-
mendous battles with the Sikhs in the Panjab.
Between 1849 and 1851 he spent a well-earned holi-
day of two years in England. Then, returning to
India, rose higher and higher in the army of the
Honourable East India Company, and took a promi-
nent part in the campaign against Persia in 1857 — a
campaign which was really the outcome of attempts
on the part of Persia (instigated by Russia) to make
herself the mistress of Western Afghanistan, and
possibly an ally of the Muhammadan cause and
Mughal dynasty in India.

The victories gained by Havelock and others in
Persia fortunately brought that war to a complete
conclusion and a definite peace before the Indian
Mutiny broke out. Havelock was therefore at hand
to be placed by the Calcutta Government in com-
mand of the first force which was to go to the relief
of the besieged British garrison of Kanpur and
Lakhnau.* Twice he was beaten back in his
attempt to reach and reinforce Sir Henry Lawrence,
who, with a small force of troops and civilians, and
women and children, was shut up in the Residency
of Lakhnau. But at last, joined by a detachment
under Sir James Outram, Havelock fought his way
through the winding streets and past the fortress-
houses of that great Muhammadan city, and
brought relief and hope to its British garrison. Yet

* The old-fashioned and inaccurate spelling of these names was " Cawn-
pore " and " Lucknow."

Havelock of Lakhnau

once he had marched with the remnant of his
soldiers (many of whom had died in battle or from
devastating diseases) within the shattered walls of
the fortified Residency, he himself was cut off from
the outer world ; he and his troops had merely
added to the numbers of the besieged garrison.
Outside the barracks and buildings of the Residency
enclosure there were a million of excited, enraged,
fanatical, and triumphant Muhammadans between
them and any other British force. Worn out with
fatigue and the effects of dysentery, Havelock died
two months after he had entered Lakhnau, and two
days after (all unknown to him) he had been created
a baronet, and the recipient of a life-pension voted
in the British Parliament. Though Lakhnau had
subsequently to be relieved once more (by Sir Colin
Campbell, guided by the heroic Kavanagh), and had
again to be recaptured (the city itself was aban-
doned after Sir Henry Havelock's death), its first
relief and the prevention of the massacre of its
garrison, like that of Kanpur and of Delhi, saved
the incidents of the Indian Mutiny from including
a horror of even greater extent than those which
occurred elsewhere, and British prestige from a
decisive and possibly a damning blow.

Havelock was not only a great soldier, but he
was essentially a good man, like many others of the
great ones of this period of Anglo-Indian history.
The thoroughness with which he devoted himself
to Asiatic studies, his attitude towards missionary
work of the best kind, his treatment of the natives

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of India in times of peace, and his dealings with
them in necessary warfare, were in their way quali-
ties which contributed to his success and to the
permanent good results of his work as a soldier and
administrator.

90

DAVID LIVINGSTONE OF CENTRAL

AFRICA

THE Cape of Good Hope was
rounded in 1488 by the Portuguese
navigator, Bartolomeu Diaz. In
the following century it was
visited by English ships, whose
captains more than once projected
a settlement there for furnishing
supplies to vessels bound to and
from India. In 1652 this idea was put into operation
by the Dutch East India Company, who founded
then the colony of the Cape of Good Hope. The
success of this settlement in the southernmost part
of Africa soon attracted the attention of the English
and French, and in the last quarter of the eighteenth
century it was clear that this great strategical point
would not remain much longer in the keeping of a
Dutch chartered company, but be seized on one
pretext or another by Great Britain or France. To
forestall any such attempt on the part of France,
the Cape of Good Hope was occupied by British
troops in 1796, the action being taken under the
authority of the exiled Chief Magistrate of Holland,
the Prince of Orange. In 1806 the British hold over
South Africa was made permanent by the annexa-
tion of Cape Colony. The Dutch East India Com-

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pany had come to an end, and its possessions had
been transferred to the Dutch Republic.

The result of this action on the part of Great
Britain brought speedily in its train Scottish and
English missionaries sent out by the Free Churches
of Great Britain and by the Church of England.
These missionaries were men of dauntless courage,
whom nothing could dismay — neither the rumoured
fierceness of the savage tribes, the really dangerous
boldness of lions, rhinoceroses, and buffaloes, neither
the bitter cold of the lofty tablelands and moun-
tains, nor the frightful heat and lack of water in
the deserts. Before thirty years had elapsed after
the British annexation of Cape Colony, British,
and American missionaries had penetrated to the
hitherto unknown regions of Damaraland, Bechu-
analand, Zululand, and the Transvaal. Prominent
amongst these pioneers was the Rev. Robert Moffat,
from the south-east of Scotland. On his return to
England for a much-needed rest in 1840, he met at
a missionary conference in London a sallow-faced,
dark-eyed, dark-haired Scot from Glasgow Univer-
sity, David Livingstone, who was then completing
his studies for a missionary career in London and
qualifying as a Doctor of Medicine. Listening to
the public appeals and the private conversation of
Moffat (whose daughter he was afterwards to
marry), David Livingstone decided to open his mis-
sionary career in South Africa instead of China, the
region to which his thoughts had first been turned.

He was born at the (then) pretty little town of

92

David Livingstone

Blantyre, about eight miles to the south of Glasgow,
on March 19, 1813, in a substantial stone-built,
almost castle-like, house overlooking the River
Clyde. His father, Neil Livingstone (a Highlander
by descent), was a retail dealer in tea, who, whilst
carrying his tea from house to house and village to
village, also sold books. He was a man of some
education for his time and state, but his business
did not prosper ; he was very poor, and his children
naturally had to earn their living as early as pos-
sible. Consequently David and his brothers went
to work at a cotton-spinning factory where their
grandfather had been employed.

From his earliest years, however, David Living-
stone was ardently fond of reading. When not at
the factory he was at the school (generally at night-
time), and when only ten years old he purchased a
Latin grammar out of his first earnings at the
factory. Whenever he could get out for a walk, he
studied geology in the local stone-quarries, or botany
on the hills or in the woods. The world seemed to
him so profoundly interesting that he yearned for
opportunities of studying its wonders. The writings
of a German missionary on China made him
desirous of going out to that wonderful empire as a
medical missionary. His parents and his elder
brother sympathised with this idea, and assisted
him to enter as a student in Glasgow University
when he was twenty-three years of age. He offered
his services to the London Missionary Society in
1837, an(* in 1838 he went to London as one of their

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probationers. His sweet, simple disposition and
quiet enthusiasm made him many friends in the
great city, and the Society he had agreed to serve
did their best for him. He was sent at their expense
to study Latin, Greek, and Hebrew under a clergy-
man tutor at Chipping Ongar, in Essex. For nearly
two years also he studied medicine and surgery in
the London hospitals ; and at length, at the close of
1840, having obtained his Doctor's degree in Glasgow,
and been ordained as a missionary in London, he
took ship for South Africa.

On his lengthy voyage to the Cape of Good Hope
by way of Brazil, he did not waste his enforced
leisure, but applied himself, with the assistance of
the captain, to learning the art of navigation, espe-
cially as regards the fixing of the position by latitude
and longitude. In the summer of 1841 he reached
Kuruman, in what is now British Bechuanaland.
This place was then the headquarters of the London
Missionary Society in the interior of South Africa.
To the north of Kuruman very little wa^ known,
but already vague rumours were coming through
the Bechuana people of a region with lakes and
trees lying far away to the north-west of the stony
and sandy deserts, which were then so charac-
teristic of Bechuanaland. Livingstone had scarcely
taken up his residence at Kuruman before his
curiosity was aroused by these reports, and he con-
ceived a great longing to travel due north from
Bechuanaland to Abyssinia as soon as he should
have acquired some knowledge of a native language.

94

David Livingstone

He set himself industriously, therefore, to learn
Bechuana, the language of the Bechuana tribes.

Robert Moffat and his wife had made their
home at Kuruman, and Livingstone married their
daughter Mary in 1844. Soon afterwards he made a
home for himself to the north-east, near the borders
of the Transvaal State. From this point he and his
wife moved still farther north to Chonuane, the
headquarters of a great Bechuana chief, Sechele,
King of the Bakwena tribe. Sechele was a great
friend of Sebituane, who was the leader of the
Makololo people.

The Makololo, who were to influence so pro-
foundly the journeys of David Livingstone, were a
clan that originally lived in Basutoland ; but the
terrible convulsions amongst the native races in
South Africa (started by the Zulu conquests and
raids in Natal and Eastern Cape Colony) sent the
people of Basutoland flying in all directions. One
of these fugitive tribes, known as the Makololo,
became in its turn a conquering people. Its warriors
ranged far to the north till they had crossed the
Kalahari Desert and made themselves masters of
the Barotse country, on the upper Zambesi. Sechele,
of the Bakwena, being in close relations with his
friend and helper, Sebituane, was able to give to
Livingstone still more information about the won-
derful regions north of the Kalahari Desert — of how
there were great flowing rivers ; lakes of open water,
salt or fresh ; groves of tall trees ; immense stretches
of green grass or tall reeds ; and abundance of food.

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A Gallery of Heroes and Heroines

Even round about 'where Livingstone resided in
those days, in the North-west Transvaal, the country
had a wonderful aspect, inasmuch as it swarmed
with big game to a degree which we could not prob-
ably see anywhere now in the Africa of the twentieth
century. It would have been almost impossible to
go for a three-hours' walk from Livingstone's little
settlement without beholding herds of zebra and
antelope, ostriches, perhaps a lion or a troop of lions,
a leopard, or a chita ; one would run the risk of
being tossed and smashed by a great angry white
rhinoceros or black rhinoceros ; in the thickets and
the defiles of the wooded hills there were elephants
and buffalo ; farther into the desert country on the
west there were the giraffe, oryx, and the springbok
gazelle ; hyenas howled and laughed every night ;
jackals, with their beautiful black, silver, and red-
gold fur, flitted about on the outskirts of the settle-
ment and the native villages; eagles, vultures,
hawks, soared in the heavens spying out prey, living
or dead ; it was a land teeming with wonderful
forms of life. The larger streams that united to
form the great Limpopo River were infested with
crocodiles ; the sandy districts with poisonous
snakes ; the woods and rocks with pythons and
with great man-like baboons or those wonderful
little hyraxes, who reproduce pretty closely for
us to-day the semblance of the earliest hoofed
mammals dwelling on the earth four or five million
years ago.

The earliest missionaries had not been silent

96

David Livingstone

about this wonderful fauna of inner South Africa ;
their stories and their written accounts came under
the notice of many a bold trader-adventurer who
was trying his luck in Cape Colony, and of equally
adventurous army officers going to or coming from
India and stopping at the Cape on their way. The
result was that Livingstone had not long resided at
Chonuane and Kolobefi before he became the host
of exploring sportsmen who were finding their way
into the Northern Transvaal, either to shoot ele-
phants and enrich themselves by the sale of their
ivory tusks, or who desired to buy from the natives
tusks and skins.

Already there were difficulties in the path of
these adventurers. A proportion of the Dutch
colonists of Cape Colony had grown to dislike the
action of the British Government, partly on account
of our abolition of slavery and interference to pre-
vent the natives of South Africa being enslaved or
treated unfairly. These dissatisfied " Boers " (as they
were called, from the Dutch word for farmer) had, a
few years before Livingstone's arrival and settle-
ment, migrated across the Orange and Vaal Rivers
and founded new colonies, to be known subse-
quently as the Orange Free State and the Transvaal.
Disgusted that the British should already have
taken Cape Colony and Natal — regions which had
first been discovered and settled by the Dutch — the
Transvaal Boers resolved as far as possible to pre-
vent British missionaries or sportsmen from enter-
ing the country to the north of the Orange and Vaal

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Rivers, which they had virtually conquered by their
bold attacks on the Zulu chief, Mosilikatse. So that
not only did they check missionary enterprise from
proceeding to the north-east, but they occasionally
made things unpleasant for British sportsmen like-
wise. -/

Such a man as David Livingstone, speaking well
the native language, and a thoroughgoing friend
and confidant of a great native chief like Sechele,
was an invaluable counsellor to all honest men who
desired to see the wonders of the land and to trade
fairly with the natives. Amongst such visitors to
Koloben was an Indian civilian officer, William
Cotton Oswell, together with his friend, Captain
Murray. Livingstone told Oswell native stories
about the regions of great rivers, lakes, and trees far
to the north of the Kalahari Desert. Oswell decided
to join company with him and make an attempt to
discover at any rate one of these lakes. Accordingly
they set out in the early summer of 1849 with their
ox-drawn waggons, their riding-horses, and their
Bakwena, Makololo, and Bushman guides. After
an anxious and weary journey across the desert-
anxious lest the distances should have been wrongly
computed by their native guides, and that they
should lose all their cattle from drought and lack of
food — they, to their intense joy, arrived abruptly at
the banks of a flowing stream, known as the Zouga
or Botletle. Following this stream westwards, they
reached Lake Ngami, then of much greater extent

as regards open water than at the present day.

98

David Livingstone

This great discovery made a tremendous sensa-
tion when the news of it reached England. It was
an indication that the interior of Central Africa was
not the hopeless desert that some geographers had
imagined. Livingstone, harassed by the Boers, dis-
heartened by the constant droughts which afflicted
the Bechuana people, and tended to depopulate the
country, was keen now to leave Bechuanaland
behind him, and establish his home and his teach-
ing amongst the powerful Makololo tribe in South-
central Africa. He was confident of being able to
make as great a friend of Sebituane as he had done
of Sechele. Oswell was equally anxious to make
great discoveries in the African interior. He was a
man of some means, and was also making money
by the tusks of the many elephants he shot. He
contributed, therefore, to the cost of these exploring
journeys as some return to the Livingstones for the
hospitality and the assistance they gave him. In con-
sequence, Oswell and Livingstone travelled together
from Lake Ngami northwards, and reached the Zam-
bezi at a place called Sesheke in June, 1851. To
get to Sesheke, where they expected to meet Sebit-
uane, they passed through a confusing network
of rivers, streams, and marshes ; and when they
reached the Zambezi, they only called it at first
" Sesheke.'' It was some time before they realised
they were actually on the upper waters of the great
river which flowed into the Indian Ocean in Portu-
guese East Africa. Unfortunately, a few days after
meeting Sebituane, the great Makololo chief died,

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but as one of his dying wishes he expressed the
hope that his people would assist Livingstone to
explore their country.

However, the latter could not do so with his
present equipment and circumstances, so he con-
veyed his family back to Kolobefi and thence to
Capetown. Whilst his wife and children returned
to England from the Cape, Livingstone set himself
to work at the Cape Observatory, thoroughly to
master the taking of latitude and longitude, so that
he might become an expert geographer. Then,
fitting himself out with such stores as he was able to
procure, and purchasing these for the most part by
the sale of the gifts of ivory made to him by Sechele
and other African chiefs, he returned to his old
home at Koloben (to find that it had been raided
and destroyed by the Boers), and set out once more
to cross the Kalahari Desert in waggons, and arrive
at the Makololo capital in the Chobe marshes, not
far from the Zambezi.

In his first explorations of the Upper Zambezi,
all Livingstone thought about was to get out of this
vast region of swamps (where the life even of the
natives was made wretched by malarial fever) into
some healthy district where he could found his
great missionary settlement for the evangelisation
of Central Africa. But this plan gradually expanded
into a resolve to lay bare the geographical features
of Zambezia. Having travelled up the Zambezi
almost to its actual source, aided in this by a
faithful following of Makololo, he next pushed on

100

David Livingstone

with them across the Upper Kasai River, which is
in the Congo basin, and then to the Kwango, and
finally to the Portuguese province of Angola, reach-
ing its capital, Loanda, on May 31, 1854. Several
times on the way he nearly perished from fever or
dysentery, or narrowly escaped being killed by
suspicious or hostile natives.

His arrival at the large and civilised town of
Loanda was a great event. He was certainly the
first white man who had ever crossed this section
of South-central Africa, and the Portuguese showed
him the kindest hospitality. Fitted out once more
at their expense, he regained the Upper Zambezi
with his faithful Makololo, and then followed that
river as nearly as possible all the way down to its
delta. A British war vessel picked him up at Queli-
mane and conveyed him to Mauritius, from which
island he made his way back to England overland,
having achieved a lasting fame.

From England, however, he returned to East
Africa in 1858 at the head of a well-equipped expedi-
tion sent out by the British Government to explore
the regions of the Zambezi, and ascertain how far
they were suited for cotton cultivation and for com-
merce generally. In the course of this expedition
he and his companions discovered Lake Nyasa,
hitherto only known by vague reports of Portuguese
travellers who had caught glimpses of its southern
end. From Lake Nyasa, before he returned to
England in 1864, he had made a journey westwards
on which he had collected information about other

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A Gallery of Heroes and Heroines

great lakes still farther to the west and north, and
of a mighty river that flowed from them northwards
-a river which he believed must be the Upper Nile.
With great difficulty he raised funds through the
Royal Geographical Society arid out of the sale of
his own books, and equipped a third expedition to
Central Africa, which left England in 1866. On this
occasion he travelled alone, taking no other white
man with him. Once more he reached Lake Nyasa,
on the east coast, walked round its southern ex-
tremity, and then started off to the north-west. In
this way he discovered the south end of Tangan-
yika, and then in succession Lake Mweru and Lake
Bangweulu and the mighty Upper Congo, or Lua-
pula. This river, under the name of Lualaba, he
traced northwards to about the fourth degree of
south latitude, firmly believing it to be the Nile.

Want of supplies obliged him to return to seek
for them at Ujiji, on the north-east coast of Tangan-
yika ; and here, when in the last extremity of weak-
ness, and with the sick sadness of feeling that he
was forgotten and abandoned by his fellow-country-
men, he met Henry Morton Stanley, a newspaper
correspondent, who had been sent out with a relief
expedition by the proprietor of a great American
newspaper. Stanley and Livingstone together ex-
plored the north end of Tanganyika and the country
of Unyamwezi. Then, bidding good-bye to Stanley,
with his new caravan of porters and the ample
stores that Stanley had brought him, Livingstone
obstinately made his way back to the sources, not

102

David Livingstone

of the Nile, as he believed, but of the Congo. He
determined to commence with Lake Bangweulu as
being the southernmost reservoir of this great river,
and then travel down-stream along the Lualaba
until it should become either the Nile flowing out
of the Albert Nyanza, or the Congo. But he got no
farther than the south end of Lake Bangweulu, and
died there from exhaustion on May i, 1873, sixty
years old.

On all these wonderful journeys, with their
immense additions to our knowledge of African
geography, he never lost sight of his main objective,
which was to do good to the untaught native races
of Africa. When he reached Tanganyika and
entered the eastern basin of the Congo, he realised
the full horror of the Arab slave trade, which he
saw at its worst. He therefore attempted from the
heart of Africa to arouse the conscience of the world
to put an end to this reign of cruelty and violence.
The effect of his appeal, followed as it was soon
afterwards by his death, was tremendous. It led to
an immense development of missionary energy. Six
years after he was buried in Westminster Abbey
there were great missionary settlements in Uganda
and many other parts of East and Central Africa,
on the Lower Congo, and on Lake Nyasa. Twenty-
five years after his death British and German pro-
tectorates had been founded to cover all that part of
Central and South-central Africa which was not
already claimed by the Portuguese or the French.
Stanley, Grenfell, and their successors had made

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known the whole of the Congo basin, and had
organised it into a state which, if at first cruel and
selfish in its procedure, ultimately made conditions
of life for the black people in the heart of Africa
infinitely better than they were either under
the Arabs or farther back still, when ferocious
cannibal tribes warred incessantly one against the
other. The whole of Bechuanaland is now a
civilised, temperate country, wisely ruled by its
own chiefs. The name of Livingstone justly stands
out as first amongst the great explorers of Africa in
the nineteenth century, not only because of his
many remarkable discoveries, but on account of his
unselfish devotion to the cause and interests of the
native African peoples.

104

FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE

THIS woman-hero was born at
Florence on May 15, 1820, the
daughter of an English squire,
who had a park in Hampshire
and a house in Derbyshire. She
was born with the instincts of the
great profession she was after-
wards to adopt, that of nursing
efficiently and scientifically the sick and wounded.
She was, in fact, the foundress of the modern system
of nursing the afflicted and the injured, and as such
is entitled perhaps to a greater meed of praise and
a greater amount of celebrity or immortality of
renown than is accorded to the world's greatest
conquerors. Yet this splendid woman, whose life-
work led to an immense alleviation of human
misery, received no recognition — no decoration, no
peerage, no pension, not even the official thanks
of the British Government of the nineteenth cen-
tury, though that Government rewarded the vic-
torious commanders of a single battle by land
or sea with titles of nobility, ribbons, and medals
of the highest distinction, and vast sums of money.
Not until 1907, in the dawning sense of our long
injustice towards great women of all ages, did
King Edward VII., by the advice of Sir Henry

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Campbell-Bannerman, bestow on Florence Night-
ingale the Order of Merit, three years before her
death at the age of ninety.

It is said that in her childhood, when little more
than a baby, she not only nursed, but bandaged and
plastered the supposed wounds of her dolls, and as
she grew older never lost an opportunity of attend-
ing in a more or less practical fashion to suffering
dogs and cats. She was likely to be wealthy, she
was of attractive appearance, exceptionally well
educated, and well connected. But as soon as she
entered London society after her presentation at
Court, she showed clearly that she cared for nothing
but the profession of nursing. Her first season in
town, in the opening years of the reign of Queen
Victoria, was devoted to visiting hospitals and
reformatories and inquiring shrewdly into the
methods adopted for attending sick and injured
people. She then undertook a long foreign tour,
where she inspected in the same way the hospitals
of the principal towns in France and Germany. In
Germany she found more modern, more scientific,
ideas prevailing than in France, and therefore
placed herself at the Institute of Protestant Deacon-
esses at Kaiserwerth, near Dusseldorf, on the Rhine
(an institution founded in the year 1800). Here she
worked for six months, mastering all the details of
hospital management as they were understood in
the most enlightened circles at that day. Not con-
tent with German science, she then transferred
herself to Paris, and placed herself under the tuition

106

Florence Nightingale

of the sisters of the Order of St. Vincent de Paul.
Returning to England in the middle of the forties,
Florence Nightingale became interested in a Harley
Street institution -which received and tended sick
governesses who required medical treatment. She
made this institution virtually her own by the money
she put into it and the management she bestowed on
it. Here, indeed, she worked out most of her theories,
very much in advance of the opinions of the day,
and only shared by a few of the most enlightened
physicians and surgeons. Women nurses for the
sick and wounded in warfare were almost unheard
of in England at that time, and abroad scarcely
existed except where a few nuns ministered in town
hospitals which were near the base of armies or in
garrison towns. In British hospitals or private
homes the nursing of the sick was either badly and
unsympathetically done by rough men or by dirty,
frowsy, tipsy women of old age or middle age, well
summed up in Dickens's characters of Mrs. Gamp
and Betsey Prig. The idea of well-born, educated,
young, and refined women going to the seat of war
to nurse the sick and wounded, or even taking up
the nursing profession in England, was scouted
with horror as " improper," " unwomanly," or un-
practical, by all but those who had come under the
direct personal influence of Florence Nightingale.

One statesman whom she had converted to
modern ideas, and who had fortunately a large
mind receptive of reforms, was Sidney Herbert, a
minister of the Crown, and heir to a great peerage.

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The Crimean War had broken out, and soon after
the first battles which followed the landing in the
Crimea the reading public was horrified through
the letters of The Times correspondent to learn of
the death-rate going on amongst the sick and
wounded British soldiers. The War Office of that
day was utterly incompetent to organise any efficient
medical service, but Sidney Herbert fortunately
had a mind superior to the intelligence of his col-
leagues and of most contemporary statesmen.

Florence Nightingale simultaneously felt that
her mission lay in nursing the sick and wounded
of the Crimean War, and wrote to the Secretary
of State for War offering her services in any
capacity. He, Sidney Herbert, by something like
thought transference, on that very day had written
to his friend and adviser, Florence Nightingale,
asking her if she would proceed to the Crimea ! She
left England for the Black Sea on October 24, 1854,
with a staff of thirty-seven nurses, some of them
trained by herself, others volunteers newly recruited.
Some were Catholics, others were Protestants, but
all alike were converted to the gospel of Florence
Nightingale. Between the beginning of November,
1854, and June, 1855, she and her colleagues had
reduced the death-rate from wounds and infectious
diseases in the hospitals of Scutari (in Asia Minor,
opposite Constantinople) from forty-two per cent, to
only two per cent. Florence Nightingale caught
fever from the patients she attended, and was fre-
quently prostrated with almost mortal illness ; but

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Florence Nightingale

nothing would induce her to leave her post, where
she remained until the conclusion of peace and
complete cessation of warfare in July, 1856. By the
grateful soldiers she was known as the Lady of the
Lamp, for at all hours of the night she might appear
at some sick or dying man's bedside almost as
though his yearning had evoked her in the shadows,
as though by thought transference she was aware
in her own light slumbers that some sufferer craved
her presence. She nearly always slept clothed, so
that she might rise and go to her duties at a
moment's notice ; and in the nights of ghastly heat
or of freezing cold, heedless of foul swarms of noc-
turnal insects, of raving men, snarling dogs, or even
lurking hyenas, she would take up her lamp and
make her way through the corridors of stinking
hospitals or across the rough ground of camps from
tent to tent, appearing at the bedsides where she
was most needed for advice or consolation. There
is scarcely an episode in human history more
beautiful to read, more inspiring and purifying,
than the record of Florence Nightingale's two years'
work in the hospitals of Scutari between 1854 and
1856. Hearing that a man-of-war had been told off to
convey her to England after the conclusion of peace,
and that London intended to give her a public recep-
tion, she embarked on a French steamer, landed at
Marseilles, and travelled home as quietly and pri-
vately as possible through France. When a public
subscription was raised as a national recognition of

her services, she devoted the £50,000 thus placed at

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her disposal to the founding of training institutions
for hospital nurses. Her two years of fever and of
intense suffering in Asia Minor had made her per-
manently an invalid, obliged to take great care of
herself if she were to live and work ; but by taking
such care she actually attained the age of ninety,
and until a few years before her death never re-
mitted her efforts in the cause of humanity. She
turned her attention specially to the reform of sani-
tation in barracks and camps, to the organisation of
nursing in army hospitals, and to the teaching of
nursing in army medical colleges. Whenever asked
by the Governments of other nations, she gave un-
stintedly her advice in regard to the treatment of
sick and wounded in warfare or the organisation of
hospitals in times of peace. In recent years she
helped to organise that instruction regarding health
questions amongst countryfolk — cottagers and agri-
cultural labourers — which is already beginning to
produce good effects on the English and Irish agri-
cultural population.

no

GENERAL GORDON

CHARLES GEORGE GORDON,

the hero of Khartum, was born on
January 28, 1833, the fourth son of
General H. W. Gordon of the
Royal Artillery. Appropriately
enough, his birthplace was Wool-
wich, the great arsenal of London.
He was educated at Taunton in
Somersetshire, and at Woolwich itself; and received
a commission in the Royal Engineers in June, 1852.
He fought through the Crimean War, chiefly at the
siege of Sebastopol, and after the war was over re-
mained in the Near East as a surveying officer,
attached to international commissions which for a
short time longer settled the boundaries between
Turkey and Russia in Europe and Asia. He became
keenly interested in the geography of Asia Minor,
and of Armenia in particular, and lost no oppor-
tunity when it presented itself of becoming ac-
quainted with the condition of the people and the
possibilities of developing the resources of these
regions. Evidently his work attracted attention in
high quarters, because two years afterwards, when
our second war with China broke out, he was de-
spatched for service with the British expedition
destined to occupy Peking.

in 17

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One result of the breaking -down of Chinese
seclusion by the joint intervention of England and
France was the provocation of a huge and successful
uprising against the misgovernment of the Manchu
dynasty. Since the year 1644 China had not, so far
as its Emperors and aristocracy were concerned,
been governed by Chinese, but by Manchurian
Mongols from the north-east, somewhat distinct in
race, and absolutely distinct in language, manners,
and customs from the four hundred millions of
Chinese. At no time in its history (much of which
is purely mythical) has China ever been well
governed according to a European standard, and
since the eleventh century of our era it has been
subject to repeated invasions by the hardy, warlike,
and only slightly civilised races from the great
deserts and grassy plains to the north and west of
China proper. But its misgovernment and the mis-
management of its resources had probably reached
their culmination in the middle of the nineteenth
century, at that very period when China, in her
proud ignorance of the strength of Europe, resolved
to match herself against the forces of France and
England. Neither in 1840 nor in 1857-60 was our
quarrel with China wholly a just one; but in the
main it was caused by the refusal of China to allow
unrestricted trade between her peoples and those of
the world at large, and the penetration of China by
European merchants and missionaries. The English
and French Governments were really acting in the
interest of China itself in compelling the hateful

112

General Gordon

Government of the Manchu mandarins to allow
unfettered intercourse to grow up between China
and the outside world. One result of their interven-
tion was a great popular revolt of the Chinese
against the Manchu dynasty, headed by a religious
mystic, Hung siu Tslian, who called himself "the
Heavenly King." Many of the ideas of this reformer
were good, and were based on the teaching of
Christian missionaries. Had this rebel government
of the T'aip'ings succeeded in becoming that of the
whole Empire of China, it might have forestalled by
fifty years the regeneration of China, even though no
doubt the personal behaviour of its leaders might
not have been up to our standards of right and
wrong. But for some reason it was not in the
interests of Britain and France that the rebel
government should prosper. They feared amongst
other things that in its success it would occupy and
control the international trading settlement at
Shanghai. The merchants here had themselves got
up a fighting force to defend their city against the
armies of the Heavenly King. Gordon was detailed
by the British Government to become an officer in
this army of Shanghai. Later, at the request of
Li Hung Chang, the astute Manchu statesman of
China, General Gordon was lent by the British
Government to command a contingent of Chinese
soldiers who were to be specially employed in
putting down this T'aip'ing revolt. Though Gordon
must have realised that as compared with Manchu
policy the T'aip'ings stood for a regenerated and

A Gallery of Heroes and Heroines

reformed Chinese, he lent himself to the wishes of
his Government, and organised what came to be
known as the " ever- victorious army' of Chinese
soldiers, which eventually subdued the whole of
the T'aip'ing reform movement and re-established
Manchu authority throughout the vast Empire.
Gordon was amazingly successful, because he treated
his Chinese soldiers with absolute justice, saw that
they were paid, well clothed, and well fed. Needless
to say he was a man of almost quixotic honesty, not
only being incapable, as most British officers would
be, of making any profit out of his position, but even
refusing salaries and rewards to which he was
entitled. At intervals he became disgusted with the
Manchu officials, and although he obeyed most of
their behests (but by no means all) and contributed
to this restoration of the Manchu Empire, yet he
refused any due reward for his services, accepting
high decorations from the Emperor of China, but
refusing a sum of money as a reward for his in-
comparable services — money which would have been
of no account to the vast hoards of the Manchu
Treasury, but which might have made Gordon a
rich man for the rest of his life.

In the later sixties, Gordon — who in appearance
was a slightly built, not very tall man, with a
pleasant boyish face, light brown hair, and grey-blue
eyes- -settled down in command of the Royal
Engineers at Gravesend, in order to erect forts for
the defence of the Thames. For six years he made
a close study of the poor in the East End of London

114

General Gordon

and along both banks of the lower Thames, where
there was then, and where there is still, a crowded
and very poor population, whose conditions of life in
those days were cruelly and unjustly hard. He did
much in these directions (especially round about
Greenwich and Woolwich) to forestall the ideas of
Sir Robert Baden Powell. In fact, had he been less
of a mystic and a more practical person, he might
have originated the idea of the Boy Scouts, which
has such a great future before it.

In 1871 Colonel Gordon was sent out as a British
representative on a commission to regulate the
navigation of the lower Danube. This brought him
into touch with the Turkish authorities and those
who were advising the Khedive of Egypt. In the
forties, fifties, and sixties of the nineteenth century
British traders, explorers, and big-game hunters had
taken a great interest in the affairs of the Egyptian
Sudan, had extended our knowledge of that region
very considerably. In the person of Sir Samuel
Baker they had assisted the Egyptian Government
to establish its authority up the course of the
Mountain Nile as far as the great lakes of Equatorial
Africa. Upon the retirement of Sir Samuel Baker
the Khedive wanted another Englishman to take
his place as Governor of the southernmost portion of
the Egyptian Sudan. Gordon was probably recom-
mended by Nubar Pasha for the post. He accepted
the appointment and made his way to Khartum
from the port of Suakin on the Red Sea, a route
hitherto but little opened up, though it is now the

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easiest means of obtaining access to the heart of the
Egyptian Sudan. To Gordon we owe the first
accurate surveys of the hilly, semi-desert region
between the Red Sea and the Nile, south of the Fifth
Cataract and near its junction with the last of its
great tributaries (the Atbara), before it enters the
Nubian Desert.

It is in connection with what is now the Anglo-
Egyptian Sudan that Gordon's name and fame are
most likely to be immortal. This vast region of
North-East Africa has possibly always had within
the last ten thousand years some sort of connection
with Egypt, merely because it is within the basin of
the Nile. The ultimate sources of the Nile rise in
the high mountains close to the north-east coast of
Tanganyika in about three degrees S. latitude.
Under the name of Kagera these waters flow into
the great but shallow Victoria Nyanza Lake. Other
streams on the flanks of the lofty Umfumbiro
volcanoes create the Edward Nyanza out of which
flows the Semliki into the Albert Nyanza. The
overflow of Lake Victoria (discovered by Speke and
Grant in 1862) passes under the name of the Victoria
Nile into the north end of Albert Nyanza. Here the
twin headstreams of the Nile, vaguely known by
repute to Greek geographers one thousand eight
hundred years ago, unite in one great river, the
Mountain Nile. This, flowing due north, is joined
near the tenth degree of N. latitude by the many
rivers of the Bahr al Ghazal. At Khartum, in about
sixteen degrees N. latitude, the Blue Nile or prin-

116

General Gordon

cipal river of Abyssinia joins its waters to the White
Nile, which has come all the way from three degrees
south of the Equator. After that, with the exception
of the Atbara, the Nile has no other tributary in the
present age, but winds for one thousand five hundred
miles through deserts, sandy and stony, till it reaches
its muddy delta and discharges into the Mediter-
ranean. But it has constituted for ages a water-road
between the Mediterranean and the very heart of
Africa; and up this road from north to south men
of what we call the Caucasian race have travelled
ever and again, taking with them the domestic
animals, the arts and crafts and religious ideas, of
the early civilised Mediterranean basin to the negro
peoples of Africa, living till quite recently in a state
of utter savagery. When Egypt was part of the
Roman Empire Egyptian influence reached far into
the Sudan, into "Negro" Africa. When the Arabs
displaced the Romans and Greeks they confined
themselves chiefly to spreading over the regions
north of the Bahr-al-Ghazal junction with the
White Nile. They called the regions inhabited by
negroes " Sudan," or " Land of the Blacks." Civilised
Europe began to inquire into this region of the
Egyptian Sudan after the wonderful adventures of
the Portuguese in Abyssinia in the sixteenth cen-
tury, but did not pay special attention to exploration
of the Nile basin until the eighteenth century, when
the great Scottish explorer, James Bruce, made his
way into Abyssinia, rediscovered the Blue Nile, and
followed it down to Khartum, thence making his

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way to Alexandria. After Muhammad All (the
Albanian soldier from European Turkey) had made
himself master of Egypt in the early nineteenth
century, he was urged to extend his dominion up
the Nile beyond Aswan to Nubia and Khartum.
The application of steam to navigation made the
exploration of the Nile a good deal easier. In two
years, between 1820 and 1822, the Turco-Egyptians
had made themselves masters of the Northern Sudan,
with their capital at Khartum. French, English,
Germans, Austrians, Greeks, and Italians followed
in their wake to serve as engineers or mining
prospectors, doctors, missionaries, or traders. A
tremendous slave trade sprang up as the result of
the Egyptian occupation of these regions. Hundreds
of thousands of negroes were exported from the
Sudan to Egypt, Arabia, Turkey, and Persia, and
even to the plantations of America. The British
people were shocked at the revelations made by
British explorers and Austrian missionaries as to
the devastation of this part of Negroland, which was
being carried on by Egyptian, Nubian, Arab, Greek,
and Maltese slave traders. Hence the Khedive of
Egypt felt obliged to put down these slave raids, and
to do so employed British and American officers in
the Sudan.

But both Sir Samuel Baker and Charles Gordon
found themselves obliged to work under a Turkish
or Egyptian Governor of the Sudan residing at
Khartum, who being a Mohammedan did not
sympathise with the idea of suppressing the very

118

General Gordon

lucrative slave trade. Gordon found during the first
two years and a half (1874 to 1877) of his work in the
Equatorial Sudan that his interference with the
shocking slave raids of the Arabs and Nubians
was hampered by the Khedive's representative at
Khartum. Therefore, after establishing a line of
stations from the junction of the Sobat up the
Mountain Nile to the Albert Nyanza, and projecting
the future conquest of Uganda and of the region
between the Victoria Nyanza and the Indian Ocean,
he returned to England and refused to resume his
work in the Sudan unless he were made Governor-
General over the whole of it, over all the regions
between Wadi Haifa and Uganda, Darfur and
Abyssinia. The Khedive consented, and Gordon
resumed work in 1877 after his brief holiday in
England. He first went into Abyssinia to try to
make peace on satisfactory terms between the King
of Abyssinia and the Egyptians (who had been
trying for several years to conquer that mountain
country and add it to the dominions of the Khedive).
But the King of Abyssinia had gone south to fight
his rival Menelek, King of Shoa (afterwards Emperor
over all Ethiopia). Gordon therefore applied himself
to solving the very difficult situation in Darfur.
This westernmost province of the Egyptian Sudan,
which still enjoys a semi-independence, borders on
the most warlike and fanatical state of the Sudan-
Wadai — a region only definitely conquered by the
French two or three years ago, and formerly the

chief centre of the slave raiding and slave trading of

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Central Africa. Gordon solved the difficulty of
Darfur as he did so many others in China, Abys-
sinia, and the Southern Sudan, by courage and
straightforwardness. He traded, so to speak, on the
reputation the English had already acquired in
Central Africa, as honest men wishing to do right
by the natives of the land. Accompanied only by
an interpreter, he rode into the camp of the Darfur
insurgents who were besieging the Egyptian garri-
sons, and thus effected an honourable arrangement
which enabled him to withdraw the Egyptian troops
and yet retain the country within the Khedive's
dominions. After this he attempted once again
negotiations with Abyssinia.

These negotiations were interrupted by a sum-
mons to Cairo, where the distracted Khedive of
Egypt was in great difficulties owing to the bank-
ruptcy of his administration and the intervention of
France and England. The European Powers, how-
ever, refused to accept Gordon as head of a financial
commission which was to settle the Khedive's
difficulties, and he therefore returned to his govern-
ment of the Sudan, proceeding to the outlying
province of Somaliland. This region of the eastern
horn of Africa had not long before been annexed to
the Egyptian dominions, together with all the coast-
lands of Abyssinia along the Red Sea. The head-
quarters of its government was the interesting town
of Harrar, an ancient colony of Arabia where an
Arabian type of language was still spoken. Gordon
dismissed the Egyptian Governor for misconduct,

120

General Gordon

made arrangements for the better governing of
Somaliland, and then returned once more to Khartum
and Darfur, where it was necessary again to deal
with the slave traders. A tremendous campaign
against these armies of Nubians and Arabs was
organised by Gordon, and chiefly carried on by one
of the ablest of his lieutenants, Gessi Pasha, origin-
ally the mate of an Italian steamer on the Red Sea.
The semi-independent country of Darfur had been
finally conquered by the chief of the slave raiders,
Zubeir, a native of Dongola (afterwards Zubeir
Pasha). Zubeir was invited to Cairo by the Khedive
Ismail, and made a pasha, but not allowed to return
to the Sudan. His son Suleiman, however, took his
place, and made himself King, not only of Darfur,
but ruler of all the vast Bahr al Ghazal region down
to the vicinity of the Congo Basin. But in so doing
he aroused the hostility of the warlike Azande or
Nyam-nyam negroes. Gessi, taking advantage of
this, recruited large armies of these ferocious canni-
bals (who solved all the difficulties about commis-
sariat by feasting on the bodies of the slain after
every successful battle), and thus finally subdued
Suleiman, took him prisoner, and shot him after a
court-martial. Gordon co-operated in this terrific
struggle from the direction of the White Nile. He
also invaded Darfur, and reconquered that country
for Egypt. Once more — in 1879 — he made his way
to Abyssinia to negotiate a treaty of peace, but
effected nothing. King John believed himself to be
unconquerable, and therefore demanded from the

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Egyptian Government more than Gordon could
concede. Gordon therefore was sent back as a
prisoner under escort to the Egyptian town of
Masawa, on the Red Sea coast. Thence he pro-
ceeded to Cairo, and resigned his office as Governor-
General of the Sudan.

At this point in his life he exhibited once again
that petulance and lack of persistency which at
intervals marred his career and prevented it from
being one of world-wide greatness. The Abyssinian
difficulties were not of his making. Abyssinia
might be unconquerable by Egyptian troops, but
the Abyssinians were, on the other hand, quite
unable to conquer any region of the Egyptian
Sudan. Gordon, with the aid of Gessi and of Emin
(a German doctor), had conquered and was govern-
ing wisely the equatorial province which reached
to the great lakes of Central Africa, the vast Bahr al
Ghazal, and the Kingdom of Darfur, important for
its mineral wealth. All the region of the Northern
Sudan was tranquil and contented with the govern-
ment of an Englishman. Had he -returned to his
post at Khartum, and devoted himself patiently to
administrative duties, there might never have been
a revolt of the Mahdi or the appalling devastation
of the whole of the Egyptian Sudan which followed
that unhappy event. But Gordon was too ready at
all times to quarrel with his employers if things
were not exactly to his liking. He therefore left
Egypt in a huff because his old friend, the Khedive
Ismail, was no longer Prince of that country, and

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General Gordon

went to visit the King of the Belgians at Brussels
with some idea of becoming Governor of the State
which that monarch was commencing to create in
the basin of the Congo. About this time, however,
he was receiving offers from many different direc-
tions— one to be private secretary (in other words,
Vice-Governor-General) to the Marquis of Ripon in
India, or commandant of the colonial forces of Cape
Colony, or adviser to the Chinese Government at
Peking, where war seemed likely to occur with
Russia. He chose this last, but made nothing out
of it, though he put himself to enormous trouble.
In less than a year he was back in England, and
then accepted a third-rate appointment in the island
of Mauritius. Here he remained a year, and the
ministry of the Cape having renewed their offer, he
next proceeded to Cape Colony with the intention of
assisting them to settle the affairs of the native
State of Basutoland. But he held the position of
commandant of the colonial forces of Cape Colony
for only a few months, for his visit to Basutoland
convinced him of the incapacity, and even the
treachery, of the Government of Cape Colony in
dealing with the affairs of this important native
state. Here again a little patience and a little more
discretion might have made him master of the situa-
tion, and able to prevent many of the unhappy
events which subsequently followed in the history
of South Africa. In 1883 he was back again in
England, this time without any offers of employ-
ment. He therefore went off to Palestine, and

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devoted himself for a year to the study of Bible
history and an attempt to explain its many problems
by the investigation of buried monuments.

Once more, however, the King of the Belgians
invited him to become Governor of the future Congo
Independent State, already threatened by the Arab
slave traders from Zanzibar and the Mahdi's fol-
lowers from the Sudan. Gordon agreed, but imme-
diately afterwards was implored by the British
Government to become once more Governor-General
of the Egyptian Sudan for the sole purpose of with-
drawing all the Egyptian garrisons from that
threatened region and abandoning it to the victorious
slave raiders. Gordon accepted this preposterous
and undignified proposal, no doubt hoping in his
heart of hearts that once he got back to Khartum as
Governor-General his personal prestige would enable
him to put down the Mahdi and his " dervishes," as
he had put down so many of the Mahdi's prede-
cessors, and to make himself a semi-independent
ruler in the heart of Africa. Accordingly he was
back again at Khartum in February, 1884. He
effected at once the return of about 2,500 men,
women, and children of the Egyptian garrisons,
but was loath to surrender to anarchy and the
slave-trader these regions of vast extent peopled by
millions of negroes, Nubians, Galas, and Arabs. He
therefore conceived the idea that if Zubeir Pasha
were sent back from Cairo to Khartum, he might
persuade this great leader (at one time virtually

King of Darfur) to accept an alliance and a great

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General Gordon

position under the Egyptian Government, and so
enable him to hold back the horrible devastations
of the fanatical Mahdists. But the British Govern-
ment, which blundered in every conceivable way
over this appointment of Gordon, refused to allow
him to have Zubeir. After waiting until the chances
of relief were almost hopeless, till town after town
along the Desert Nile had surrendered to the Mah-
dists and Khartum was completely isolated, our
Government despatched a large army under Lord
Wolseley to relieve the siege of Khartum and rescue
Gordon from his perilous position. The attempt
was a foredoomed failure ; and although by almost
incredible efforts and deeds of striking gallantry
Gordon kept the Egyptian flag flying, on January 26,
two days before the advance-party of the relieving
army reached the river-front of Khartum, that city
had fallen to the Mahdist assault, and Gordon had
been speared and beheaded as he advanced to meet
the " dervishes " at the head of the staircase in the
Governor's palace. His defence of Khartum was
one of the most heroic deeds in the history of the
British people, just as the whole of the circum-
stances connected with his despatch to the Sudan,
and his treatment there by the British Government
of his day, constitutes one of the saddest examples
of official ignorance and half-heartedness.

125 19

ROBERT FALCON SCOTT OF THE

ANTARCTIC

IN 1487 the great Portuguese
sea - captain, Bartolomeu Diaz,
rounded, almost without knowing
it, the Cape of Good Hope, and
steered his ships a hundred miles
or so to the utmost prolongation
of Africa. The Portuguese sea-
men felt the Antarctic chill in the
south winds that blew off the glaciers and icebergs
of Enderby Land. They realised not only that Africa
was virtually an island, but that far to the south of
Africa there lay a region of bitter cold correspond-
ing to the Arctic regions at the opposite extremity
of the globe.

When Magellan passed through the straits be-
tween Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, he and the
Europe of his day believed that Tierra del Fuego
was the northernmost point of a great Antarctic
continent. But Drake and the Dutch navigators
who followed in Drake's track showed that a con-
siderable stretch of stormy sea lay to the south of
Tierra del Fuego. Tasman, the discoverer of Aus-
tralia, Tasmania, and New Zealand, ascertained
that these other lands of the south were no part of

an Antarctic continent ; and although the existence

126

Robert Falcon Scott

of such a continent was firmly believed in through
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, no
plausible proof of the theory was advanced until
the year 1820, when a Russian Antarctic expedition
under Captain von Bellingshausen virtually dis-
covered the northern limits of Enderby Land to the
south of the Indian Ocean. Nine years afterwards
Captain John Biscoe, commanding a ship belonging
to the firm of Enderby Brothers of London (engaged
in the whaling industry* of the South Seas), sighted
Cape Ann of Enderby Land, and in the following
year discovered Graham Land, immediately south
of Tierra del Fuego. The first great advance, how-
ever, towards the South Pole was made by the
British Government expedition of 1839, under the
chief command of Sir James Ross, who attacked
Antarctica in the direction of Australia and New
Zealand. His two ships made their way through
the pack-ice into the open water of Ross Sea, and
raised the British flag on an island off Victoria
Land. They discovered the northernmost of the
lofty mountains of Antarctica, amongst which were
the great volcanoes of Erebus and Terror, and the
great ice barrier, "unlike any object in nature ever
seen before, rising perpendicularly from the sea to
the height of two hundred to three hundred feet."
Although Antarctic exploration was resumed

* This industry, which developed greatly during the beginning of the
nineteenth century, and led to many discoveries in the Pacific and South
Atlantic Oceans, was stimulated by the increased education of modern
Europe, which needed candles to read by (before the use of gas), and
spermaceti to make those candles.

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A Gallery of Heroes and Heroines

again in 1874, no further advance towards the con-
quest of the South Pole was made until the British
National Antarctic Expedition was sent out in 1901
by the Royal Society and the Royal Geographical
Society of London. This expedition was under the
command of Captain Robert Falcon Scott of the
Royal Navy, and had among its subordinate officers
(Sir) Ernest Shackleton, who on an expedition of
his own in 1909 was to be the first person to get
within an easy distance of the South Pole. But the
foundation of success in all succeeding Antarctic
exploration was laid by the patient investigation,
the scientific accuracy, and the heroism of Robert
Falcon Scott, a Devonshire man, born at Outlands,
near Devonport and Plymouth, on June 6, 1868.

Robert Scott was destined for the Navy from his
boyhood, and consequently was educated at a school
in Fareham, near Portsmouth. He entered the
Navy in 1882, and a few years afterwards, in the
West Indies, made an acquaintance which was
destined to effect the whole course of his life. Sir
Clements Markham, a great explorer himself, and
for years either Secretary or President of the Royal
Geographical Society, was travelling in the West
Indies, and, when stopping at the island of St. Chris-
topher, encountered a training squadron of the
Royal Navy. The Lieutenants of this squadron
had designed a cutter race to test the steering and
sailing capacities of the midshipmen. " They were
to get under weigh, make sail, race round a buoy ;

then down masts, pull round the second buoy,

128

Robert Falcon Scott

return to the first place, and make all secure again."
Scott won the race. Sir Clements Markham even
then was agitating for a resumption of Antarctic
discovery, and mentally noted Scott as having the
makings of a good polar officer. He kept in touch
with him for years after the meeting at St. Chris-
topher. And, curiously enough, when in 1900 Sir
Clements Markham asked the advice of an Admiral
(distinguished for his own work in polar regions) as
to who would be the best naval officer to command
an expedition which might penetrate to the South
Pole, Scott was the man suggested. Scott was there-
fore ultimately appointed by the Royal and Royal
Geographical Societies.

Apparently there was some retreat of the ice
barrier since the discoveries of Ross sixty years
before; and this lessening of frigid conditions may
have enabled Scott to penetrate inland with less
difficulties than Ross. He easily found King
Edward's Land in 1901-2. Its existence had only
been guessed at by Ross. But King Edward's Land
was far to the east of any direct route to the Pole, so
that Scott returned to the vicinity of the volcanoes
Erebus and Terror (they were found to constitute in
reality a volcanic island separated from the main-
land). His ship, the Discovery, passed into McMurdo
Sound, and up this narrow strait (which may or
may not be a portion of a great gulf separating
Antarctica into two divisions) he travelled with
dog sledges as soon as they were able to leave their

winter quarters in the autumn of 1902. On this and

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A Gallery of Heroes and Heroines

subsequent journeys they sighted mountains of
great altitudes — over fifteen thousand feet. Beyond
the granite summits of these mountains they reached
a vast snow-covered plateau nine thousand feet
above sea-level. On this journey the farthest south
reached by Scott was eighty-two degrees seventeen
minutes. He also made a considerable journey due
west from McMurdo Sound over the lofty plateau,
which was nine thousand feet above sea-level and
coated with snow of immeasurable thickness. On
returning from this exploration he found that a
relief-ship had arrived with orders that he should
leave for England at once, and abandon the Dis-
covery. The public had at the time lost interest in
Antarctic exploration, disputes had arisen between
the scientific societies and the British Government,
the expedition was recalled, and Scott probably
balked of a good opportunity of reaching the South
Pole, since he now thoroughly understood all the
conditions of travel. So far from abandoning the
Discovery, however, he managed to extract her from
McMurdo Sound, and brought her back safely to
England.

Here he resumed his service in the Imperial
Navy. He married, and became the father of a
little boy (Peter Scott). In 1909 Sir Ernest (then
Lieutenant) Shackleton, who had come out the
previous year in order to continue Scott's dis-
coveries, actually got to within one hundred miles
of the South Pole. Shackleton had taken with him
as a means of transport Manchurian ponies in

130

Robert Falcon Scott

preference to Eskimo dogs. Shackleton's near
attainment of success and the remarkable nature of
his geological discoveries (for his and Captain Scott's
specimens, besides those secured by other scientific
expeditions farther north in Antarctica, showed that
this Sixth Continent, before it came under the
horrible sway of the ice, had been a habitable land
with trees and plants) made Antarctic exploration
once more a matter of interest to the British public.
A great new expedition was got up with Govern-
ment encouragement and support, and Captain
Scott was placed at the head of it. He left England
in the Terra Nova (the vessel sent out by the
Admiralty to relieve the Discovery in 1904) in the
summer of 1910, and, after a short stay in New
Zealand, reached the Antarctic regions in Decem-
ber, struggled through the ice pack, got into the open
water of Ross Sea, and finally reached the great ice
barrier and the black, brown, and yellow mountains
of Ross Island and McMurdo Sound in January,
1911. Here they were invading " Penguin Land," a
region which, save for the previous visits of Scott
and Shackleton and the far earlier explorations of
Ross, had been hitherto preserved from man's inter-
ference. Here had lived for untold ages a remark-
able type of sea-bird, the penguins, which with the
skua gull and the seals were the only frequenters of
the shore. In the clear water just beyond the ice
barrier were swarms of killer-whales - - a huge
species of dolphin, with many fierce teeth in its
-wide jaws, as ferocious and as bloodthirsty as the

131 20

A Gallery of Heroes and Heroines

tiger. Farther out at sea there were whales both of
the toothed and whalebone kinds. These were the
only air-breathing creatures of Antarctica, though
fish, molluscs, and crustaceans were abundant in
the open water. To these now, as a new coloniser
of Antarctica, was added Man, who had arrived from
the other side of the globe, bringing with him two
of his domestic animals — ponies from Manchuria
and Eskimo dogs from Northern Asia or North
America. The penguins were so unused to any
rival on land, except the impudent skua gulls, which
occasionally carried off their eggs or their young,
that they at once waddled up to the Eskimo dogs to
protest against their landing, and were, of course,
immediately killed and eaten.

On January n, 1911, in the height of the Antarctic
summer, Scott had been already established a week
on land. The weather he described as " fine and
warm," though the temperature at its best was
probably only fifty degrees Fahrenheit in the day-
time and down to freezing-point at nightfall, and all
about them lay ice and snow. Already, in order to
economise supplies, they had begun to eat penguin
and skua gull. Their " hut ' in a fortnight's time
had become " the most comfortable dwelling-place
imaginable," " a truly seductive home," within the
walls of which peace, quiet, and comfort reigned
supreme. It was in reality a house fifty feet long by
twenty-five feet wide and nine feet high at the
eaves, nestling below a small hill on a long stretch

of black sand. North and south of Cape Evans, on

132

Robert Falcon Scott

which they had established themselves, were deep
bays of blue sea dotted with shining icebergs, and
beyond these inlets of blue water were glaciers-
rivers of gleaming ice on the lower slopes of the
mighty volcano, Erebus. This towered above the
horizon — a grand snowy peak with a smoking
summit. Indeed, from the point of view of scenery,
the Antarctic is far superior to the Arctic, with its
ranges of lofty mountains going up to and beyond
the greatest heights of the Alps, almost to those of
the Andes, its superb and fantastic cliffs and peaks
of ice, its fields of unruffled snow, gulfs of intensely
blue, sea, and in the summer-time areas of black,
brown, and yellow rock.

From his base at Cape Evans, on Ross Island,
just under the huge volcano, Erebus, Scott started
off, only twenty days after his arrival, to lay the
foundations of a series of depots on the direct route
towards the South Pole. This task occupied him
through the southern summer, autumn, and winter.
At the commencement of the following spring,
equivalent to the late autumn of our northern
regions, he commenced his final journey to the
South Pole. He reached his objective, delayed by
many and inconceivable obstacles chiefly due to
appalling weather, not in the early, but in the late,
summer of the Antarctic, on January 17, 1912. As
he neared the actual position of the Pole — ninety
degrees — a small object in the waste of snow caught
the eyes of himself and his party, and struck them
with dismay. It was a tattered black flag. Scott

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A Gallery of Heroes and Heroines

had already heard before his departure rumours of
Amundsen's intended dash for the South Pole. This
Norwegian expedition, history will say, did rather a
mean trick. Amundsen had been a member of an
Antarctic expedition years before. He knew of the
years of work, the thousands of pounds of British
money which Scott and Shackleton had employed
to reach the South Pole by what may be called the
Australian route. Yet he did not scruple to try and
snatch the prize from their grasp in availing himself
of their published experiences. Giving out officially
that he was organising a North Polar expedition, he
started instead for the Antarctic, landed on the
coast of King Edward VII. 's Land, some distance
along the great ice barrier east of McMurdo Sound
and Ross Island, made a dash for the Pole with his
dog sledges, and got there on December 16, 1911,
thirty-two days before Scott himself.

Scott and his companions — Dr. Wilson, Captain
Gates, Lieutenant Bowers, and petty-officer Evans
-therefore realised that they had been forestalled,
but they probably understood on reflection that the
real merit of the discovery lay with them and with
their former associate, Shackleton; and that whereas
Amundsen might write a pamphlet on the discovery
of the South Pole, they could put before the world
two volumes on the wonders of Antarctica. But
they also realised by the time they reached the Pole
that their chances of regaining safety were pre-
carious, owing to the lateness of the season, their
shortage of supplies, and the ill-health of one or two

134

Robert Falcon Scott

of the party. The story of their retreat northwards
is one of the most pathetic in history. Petty-officer
Evans was at last so ill that he could scarcely travel.
Yet they had to accommodate their pace to his,
whilst he slowly died. The survivors were within
eleven miles of the comparative safety of a depot of
food, fuel, and stores, which was within easy distance
of the ship and the navigable ocean, when, owing to a
blizzard lasting four days without intermission, they
died of cold, hunger, and exhaustion. Scott possibly
survived to the last, and lay writing the journal for
our information with a calm preparedness for death,
which is awe-inspiring, and which will always, in
conjunction with his splendid services to science
and his flawless personal character, make him one
of the great figures in our history — a hero if ever
there was one.

What lesson are we to derive, what moral are we
to draw, from reading these sketches of the lives of
heroes and heroines ? It is assumed by the writer
that this book will be read chiefly by young people
-boys and girls and young students. With the very
natural and healthy dislike that the youth of the
rising generation has for sermons and for anything
that is unduly sentimental or mawkish, or which
aggressively points a moral, or incites one to do dis-
agreeable duties or attend to tedious lessons, there
may be some reluctance even to reading about the

135

A Gallery of Heroes and Heroines

lives of " heroes." Works of an earlier date which
had heroic figures as their subject reduced the
present writer in Jiis young days to something like
despair. It seemed so difficult to be a hero. You had
to be born and to remain more or less faultless ; you
must never tell a lie (an admirable prescription) ;
and apparently, if you did slip from the path of
rectitude in this respect, you were doomed not to be
a hero worth mentioning. Perfection, in short, was
expected of you ; or at any rate was provided for you,
if you were a hero, by your biographers. Then,
again, you must have an immense reverence for
your parents and guardians and teachers, obey all
their precepts, never think for yourself; and yet do
something strikingly original.

Another class of writer gave a different impres-
sion. He or she also believed that heroes were born,
not made by circumstances. But they were geniuses ;
they were gifted in some way beyond other human
beings; apparently mental training and education
counted for little. If you were born a hero, you did
heroic things, with very little knowledge of reading,
writing, or arithmetic, foreign languages, or natural
science.

Now, when we examine the lives I have en-
deavoured to describe, we find that very few of the
heroes were really faultless. Elizabeth Fry and
Florence Nightingale may have been without a
blemish ; perhaps they never lost their tempers,
were never spiteful, never untruthful, never un-
generous. At any rate, no account of them has

136

Education makes Heroes and Heroines

suggested such faults of character. Of one or two
of my male heroes — men like Captain Scott — the
same thing might be said ; and yet Elizabeth Fry,
Florence Nightingale, and certainly Captain Scott,
were thoroughly lovable people, capturing the liking
of all who came into contact with them. But the
outstanding feature, to my mind, in the lives of all
these heroes is that their heroic deeds were not
based on some wonderful undefined talent or power,
but on the soundest education they could possibly
acquire for the age in which they lived. Look at
the pains that Wellington took to perfect his educa-
tion as a military commander, to acquire the French
language, to understand the geography of France
and Belgium (almost, as it were, by some foresight).
Remember how Havelock made a thorough study
of Hindustani before he even went out to India,
and how he became proficient as an interpreter in
Persian, and possibly also in Burmese. Note how
Livingstone from his early boyhood never lost an
opportunity of acquiring knowledge which he might
apply some day ; how, on his three months' voyage
by a sailing-ship to the Cape, he spent all his spare
time in studying the arts of navigation and astro-
nomical observation ; how he mastered Latin and
Greek whilst still working in a cotton-factory, and
how that Latin and Greek helped him to under-
stand Portuguese and French and the science of
linguistics generally; how, far back in the nine-
teenth century, he had the wit to write down African
languages in a phonetic spelling, which is just as

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A Gallery of Heroes and Heroines

applicable to them at the present day ; how, before
he touched Africa, he had acquired a sound ground-
ing in botany and in geology, so that, as he walked
through Africa afterwards, he read it like a great
open book, guessing from the fossils of the rocks,
the plants and the beasts, and the native races, its
past history far back into time — guesses which have
since been confirmed by the discovery of many more
facts than he knew of. Think how closely Nelson
had studied his profession as a naval officer, and
firstly in quite a humble way by learning pilotage
amongst the shoals and tidal creeks of the Medway
and the Thames. Such knowledge enabled him at
once to grasp the situation of Napoleon's fleet in the
Bay of Abukir, and to win that Battle of the Nile
which eventually made Britain mistress of Egypt,
of India, and of much else besides. Drake was a
learned man amongst the glorious pirates of his
day, and, after his lights, he was a good man, too.
He was mistaken, no doubt, in his general attitude
towards the Spaniards, but he was not mistaken in
the objects for which he really fought — freedom of
trade and freedom of intercourse between all the
countries of the globe.

All these people lived in advance of the age in
which they were born, partly because they were
men and women of genius — you cannot eliminate
that mysterious factor, genius — but also because
they were people of good education. Without
education genius is often wasted, and is a force
which cannot be applied at the right moment and

138

Education makes Heroes and Heroines

in the right manner. From their lives, it seems to
me, we have to derive these general lessons. Firstly,
that of the supreme importance of a sound and a
general education. Be interested in coins or stamp-
collecting, if you like, but also study natural history
and the history of the human race. Never neglect
an opportunity of learning what you can about bee-
keeping, book-keeping, gardening, or brick-laying, or
the application of electricity. Snatch at every oppor-
tunity to enlarge your mind and your interests.
These great people of the past, being well-educated
for their age, were able to appreciate and respect the
lessons of the past, the great deeds that had gone
before them, the great thoughts of long-dead men
and women, thoughts which soared over the heads
of common humanity, and which still seem above
our own outlook. But they had no slavish rever-
ence for the past or for the wishes or precepts of
their own parents. If their fathers and mothers
were able through their own education to appreciate
the wisdom of their children, well and good ; but if,
as often happens, their parents were narrow-minded
or foolish, these great people refused to be hampered
by parental restrictions. There may be many a
potential Florence Nightingale at the present day
who would like to take up a similar life, but who
is deterred by her father, mother, or guardian from
so doing. She should not, while she is in her teens,
rashly conclude that her elders are wrong; but
she should endeavour by the time she is twenty-
one to be sufficiently educated to judge for herself.

139 21

A Gallery of Heroes and Heroines

Never, however, refuse to entertain an idea or
attempt a project because other people older than
yourself tell you that " it cannot be done " or that
" it is wrong." They may be right — at any rate
about the last proposition — but they are much more
likely to be prejudiced or narrow in their own out-
look. Educate yourselves, and with this assurance
take the leap into the unknown.

WELLS 6ARDMER, DAXIOM AIU> CO., LTD., LONDON

o

CZCT. MOV 2 9 1967

DA Johnston, (Sir) Harry
28 Hamilton
J6 A gallery of heroes and
heroines

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